If all you want is ssh the easiest and cheapest way might be to hire a VPS, connect to it and connect to tailscale there. Just ensure you have very strict rules on ssh and you should be safe enough.
Exposing web services in this manner is also easy using Caddy, but be careful since the services would then be publicly available.
Use docker, once you’re comfortable with it then switch to Podman. Podman has a few more complications, so it’s easier to get the base thing running using the most common tool, and work from there.
If you don’t give immich write access to photos you lose one of their biggest advantages, i.e. having your phone upload the photos directly. So now you need something else like syncthing to do that job, which is not as elegant.
Extra question for people who have been using it. It says the bandwidth is unlimited, how unlimited are we talking about?. I was considering getting one to use as a reverse-proxy into my home lab to be accessible from the outside, which would mean lots of bandwidth usage, media streaming amounts.
That’s interesting, although most of it is directed at people building the images, the fact that pushing without a tag sets the latest is something I did not know and something that I could see the human factor causing a problem.
Why? Latest means latest stable for most services
That’s the thing, if the project is too early to have a stable enough structure to allow for programatical updates then it’s probably too early to offer something “perpetual”
I agree, I’m not trying to bad mouth the project, I just feel that they shouldn’t change from a donation structure until they have a stable version of the product.
Yeah, I have high hopes for the project, it ticks almost every box for me. I would still prefer to be able to store tags in the actual images and use them and also be able to recover a library already in the proper folder (so in the case of a catastrophic failure, reimporting the full library is a matter of minutes not days, not to mention having to retag people, etc).
My point is that projects should ask for donations when they’re so early in development, asking for a subscription implies you have a stable product.
Yup, and I’m fine with that, but I think that switching from a donation to a subscription model before then is wrong.
I don’t mind this model. That being said for me Immich is great but has a fatal flaw that has prevented me from using it: it doesn’t do updates.
For me that’s a big one, everything else I self host I have a docker compose pointing to latest, so eventually I do a pull and up and I’m done, running the latest version of the thing. In Immich this is not possible, I discovered the hard way that they are not backwards compatible and that if you do that you need to keep track of their release notes to know what you need to manually do to update.
I haven’t settled on a self-hosted photo management because of this. In theory Immich has almost everything I want (or more specifically, all of the other solutions I found lack something), but having to keep track of releases to do manual upgrades is stupid, this is a software, it should be easy to have it check the version on start and perform migration tasks if needed.
When my server was a laptop it was on 24/7. When my server was a desktop I had a cron job to turn it off at 2AM. Now that it’s a specialized hardware it’s on 24/7.
Being constantly on is very convenient, but if your services start quickly it’s not the end of the world to have to turn the machine on for them.
Thanks, I’m checking that out, but can’t find any “add services” button. Alsp someone mentioned IONOS, which is local to me and doesn’t seem to have bandwidth limits… I was trying to find the poop and they require lots of personal info just to get the account setup, still a bit torn there.
That would be awesome, currently it’s 500GB for their cheaper option which starts at 23/year. I didn’t find an option to increase the bandwidth before completing the order. Also it needs to be deployed in NY (which would be possibly slow for me in Europe). Finally their isos are somewhat old, the latest Ubuntu they have is 20.04 (which has an EoL next year).
All that being said, 23/year is very cheap for a VPS, and for people in the US that use less than 500GB/month that’s the best deal I’ve ever seen.
Do you have an alternative to cloudflare tunnels? I’d love to hear it, because I’m also not really happy about relying on them either, but tailscale only works up to an extent because not all devices can connect to it and it’s a pain in the ass to get random family members to connect to it as well.
For me self-hosted refers to #2. Many of us also have jobs that are either fully or partially related to #1, but I wouldn’t expect a #1 answer here. Questions here are usually directed to, and answered with, the #2 mentality.
They are very different things. If all of the places where you want to access the data have storage large enough to accommodate all of it syncthing is probably easier. If however you also want to access the data from your phone, then syncthing won’t work, because it will sync the entire folder to your phone, there’s no way to use it like you would Nextcloud, i.e. only downloading things as you need them.
I’ve never used Incus, but it’s not clear to me why you would choose it over docker, you said that it would be preferable if performance was better, I can already tell you it’s not, best case scenario is equivalent performance (since docker runs natively), but I doubt any VM can match that.
This will be almost impossible. The short answer is that those pictures might be 95% similar but their binary data might be 100% different.
Long answer:
Images are essentially a long list of pixels, each pixel is 3 numbers for Red, Green and Blue (and optionally Alpha if you’re dealing with a transparent image, but you’re talking pictures so I’ll ignore that). This is a simple but very stupid way to store the data of an image, because it’s very likely that the image will use the same color in multiple places, so you can instead list all of the colors a image uses, and then represent the pixels as the number in that list, this makes images occupy a LOT less space. Some formats add to that, because your eye can’t see the difference between two very close colors, they group all colors that are similar into one only color, making their list of colors used on the image WAY smaller, thus having the entire image be a LOT more compressed (but you might noticed we lost information in this step). Because of this it’s possible that one image choose color X in position Y, while the other choose Z in position W, the binaries are now completely different, but an image comparison tool can tell you that color X and Z are similar enough to be the same, and they account for a given percentage of the image depending on the amount minimum of the values Y and W. But outside of image software, nothing else knows that these two completely different binaries are the same. If you hadn’t loss data by compressing get images in the first place you could theoretically use data from different images to compress (but the results wouldn’t be great, since even uncompressed images won’t be as similar as you think), but images can be compressed a LOT more by losing unimportant data so the tradeoffs are not worth it, which is why JPEG is so ubiquitous nowadays.
All of that being said, a compression algorithm specifically designed for images could take advantage of this, but no general purpose compression can, and it’s unlikely someone went to the trouble of building a compression for this specific case, when each image is already compressed there’s little to be gained by writing something that takes colors from multiple images in consideration, needing to decide if an image is similar enough to be bundled in together with that group or not, etc. This is an interesting question, and I wouldn’t br surprised to know that Google has one such algorithm to store all images you snap together that it can already know will be sequential. But for home NAS I think it’s unlikely you’ll find something.
Besides all of this, storage is cheap, just buy an extra disk and move over some files there, that’s likely to be your best way forward anyways.