+1 for Immich, it's been cool watching their development journey on /r/selfhosted the last year or so:

https://github.com/immich-app/immich

Or if you're in the nextcloud ecosystem, you can use Memories

My only gripe with Immich is it renames the files to UUIDs, and stores them in its own directory structure. This works ok if you are only backing up images from your phone as file names don't make sense anyway, but if you have existing backups it makes it harder to sync them.

I am planning to use NextCloud for the sync, as I like its YEAR/MONTH/FILE structure, and configuring it as an external library in Immich. I could also use NextCloud Memories, but Immich UI is nicer, and its face/object recognition model is better.

Immich has a concept of storage template, which you can use to set the directory layout using year and month and maintain the original filename.

Thanks, I wasn't aware of that. Do you know why it is disabled by default? The docs say "for stability reasons" but don't elaborate further.

Historically there were integrity issues with the storage template, these should now be resolved however. The reason is disabled is quite simply that most users don't need it and it can cause a lot of IO in some scenarios, for example if your upload and library directories are on different mount points.

I’ve been playing with it the last week and there’s an option to load “external libraries” as read only. It seems to work nice for my existing photos.

External libraries are no longer readonly in the latest release as many users wanted to be able to delete photos in external libraries, but you can mount the Docker volume containing your external library as readonly if the readonly aspect is important to you.

Yeah, saw that note earlier in the week. I have it set to read-only through docker for now, but I like the idea of being able to edit metadata. We'll see.

Unless you explicitly want write, I'd leave it at read-only anyway since they had a (very, very quickly corrected) bug that could result in data loss for external libraries not mounted as read-only this last week.

copying and renaming files would be an immediate fail criteria. there is no way that i am going to let it copy and rename 1TB of photos.

but you say it can also use external libraries? so it does not copy those?

> but you say it can also use external libraries? so it does not copy those?

Yes, it only renames files automatically sync'd from your phone. My understanding is it creates a separate metadata file for each external file, but doesn't touch the actual files in an external library.

You can point it to existing folder/photo structures and it imports them as-is, you can set the mount to read only too if you want to.

So if you have existing backups just add them as external libraries.