I really feel for all the techs worldwide who have to collectively deal with this mess across the millions of endpoints that now require manual intervention to fix since it can’t be reliably automated.
I went through the same thing and eventually reached the conclusion that a VM really is the best method. I did get a working LXC Docker setup going, but I could just not get it to be as stable as a VM long-term.
I would have used Owncloud Infinite Scale but the fact you can’t use your own existing files makes it a complete non-starter for me. I don’t want my files locked behind Decomposed FS.
Unless I’ve read things wrong, which is entirely possible.
I’ve attended a seminar for child protection before that was delivered by a former cop (that worked in the sex crimes division) and they said the exact same thing - in the context of correctly making the distinction between paedophile and sex offender.
Can you view an external library using your own folder structure and not in a timeline display? I was under the impression Immich can’t do that, at least not without manually creating them all as separate albums or by using a script.
Eg.
I have photos from the last 30 years stored in this type of folder structure:
2002
2002-06-23 Mum’s birthday party
— 2002-06-23 Mum’s birthday party-0001.TIF
I’m less interested in using it for photo backup since I’d prefer not to use an automated tool since I curate everything in my library so that it stays organised - I’m looking for something for viewing/displaying and sharing.
One feature that I hope that Immich adopts is to allow for external libraries to be displayed in an existing folder structure. There’s no built-in way to do this and requires a script that uses albums as a workaround. A lot of photographers have organised folders by date/event that span years/decades, so it’s not practical to create these manually with albums.
The closest I’ve found is a cron script which does album generation automatically, but it’s not a ‘future proof’ solution since it could stop working at any time.
Memories (Nextcloud), Photoprism, and Photoview can do this.
Looks like that feature is still in beta and therefore only available in the beta client. The stable release still uses the .nextcloud extension workaround.
Is that still the case for the Nextcloud macOS client? Because this post from the devs from a few months ago implies that the .nextcloud file extension behaviour is temporary and that they’re meant to be using Apple’s File Provider API, same way that Dropbox and OneDrive do.
Syncthing doesn’t have an ‘files on demand’ feature though. The way that cloud storage providers do it is by having placeholder files which are selectively synced. Resilio Sync can do it, although it does change the file extension for the placeholder files to .rslsync temporarily.
You could probably make it work, but comments could be difficult to include.