You are technically right but as a human who just wants to watch “The Devil Wear’s Prada” after a long day at work it would be too frustrating.

You have to go through more clicks and more typing to play your media on MPV. On the other hand I can just use my remote to browse through my Jellyfin library after just opening an app.

It is just Donation Tiers I think. Maybe the per user thing only hides the “Buy Immich” button for only that specific user.

You can setup external libraries with it. So you, say, upload your photos and videos to your SMB Share, point that SMB Share as external Library in Immich and you will get the benefits of Immich while you can browse your Share normally as you would. I mean yes this is a workaround but it works.

Never used NC but this just works.

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If it works then great. I find it pretty lacking compared to Immich.

The ML is really good. Google’s Face recognition is over-confident sometimes and is difficult to remove the tagged faces and add correct ones. Immich’s is very accurate and if it misses something I can just add them — 1 step instead of 2 with Google’s.

• Short: It is a second Hardrive using borg that backs up the primary Hardrive.

• Long: My Backup strategy:-

Databases and other imp files:

For databases the backup happens every night that gets saved on the server itself. Then when my laptop connects either to the home network or to the Internet, the backup zip files on my server syncs to my laptop via syncthing. Then my laptop’s data is backed up to OneDrive (encrypted) — this includes the immich database backups. I usually keep 7 days worth of backup files just incase some get corrupted and I can just go back to the previous day.

Library

Since my Immich Library is big, daily borg backups are not possible for 200 gigs. So I have scheduled them every Sunday morning when I rarely use the server. The hardrive is exclusively used only for Immich. That hardrive is then backed up to another hardrive using borg and also to my OneDrive using rclone. (All encrypted). So 3 copies of the data, 2 on 2 different hardives (1 is primary) and 1 offsite.

Immich: Image Backup* solution — like Google Photos or Ente Photos but self-hosted.

*Backup in the sense of uploading your photos to a server you own. You should backup the database as well as your library with 3-2-1 method.

My library of 12.5k images took about 7 hours on my N100.

I’ve used Ubuntu Server, without any problems

If it works for you then great. But it doesn’t stand with your goal of Corporate Independence and Willingness to Learn — Given that it is slightly easier to setup than Vanilla Debian. But at the end of the day it is just Corporate Debian with more up-to date packages but overall less stable than Vanilla Debian.

upkeep and electricity costs of having your own hardware at home

It really won’t be much unless you’re gonna go for extremely beefy hardware like for Jellyfin hosting hundreds of newer codec 4k files with HDR and shit with dozens of users or some LLM — which anyways still would be cheaper than renting a VPS. Otherwise even a Raspberry Pi can do a decent job or even a mini pc (with something like Intel N100) which draws less power than a Mobile Phone charger. It also aligns with the idea of beginner friendly setup than using a VPS which half the people will even skip reading the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policies. So hosting something like Immich or Nextcloud, which is not encrypted at rest, is pretty much available for the VPS provider at instant.

convenience of a public IP

You don’t need a public IP to self-host. A beginner should start with private at first, learn from there and gain and grow otherwise it can lead to security risks — e.g you have mentioned to self-host Immich which doesn’t have any native 2FA. The self-hoster then will have to know about SSO based logins to secure instances like these.

use a dynamic DNS provider to get around

You also have Cloudflare Tunnel, Tailscale. Or you can use a 5$/month VPS in this instance to self-host Pangolin with Crowdsec for public access and block malicious or suspicious IPs. All of these options will mask your real public IP.

The guide was focused on being as simple and convenient as possible, with the target audience being absolute beginners

Ok but this asks for a lot of upfront investment. You don’t need to buy a domain or a VPS as a beginner (or even a mini PC as I mentioned). Just start with a PC or a Laptop you already own. Host the service and access it via private IPs instead of handholding them to copy and paste commands, configs and compose files from the internet (although you do have mentioned official documentation so kudos for that) just for the convenience of public access. A lot of people don’t know the 3-2-1 backup rule. One error might wipe off their entire Immich Library, Password Vaults or important documents in Nextcloud.

freeing yourself from your dependance on big corporations

Setting up a VPS with Ubuntu Server

This shouldn’t exist in the same article lol. You will just end up paying in subscriptions anyways while at the same time maintaining all the stacks — that too on Ubuntu where some articles will become useless after a few updates. Even 10$ a month will result in $120 every year — which can buy you a half decent second hand PC or a new Mini PC. You won’t even own your data when you rent a VPS.

You will end up saving a lot more by self hosting on your own hardware with vanilla Debian and be more independent at the same time. You will only need a VPS if you want to self-host your own reverse tunnel like Pangolin or FRP.

I don’t really bother with email — It is terrible for privacy no matter which provider you use if the person sending you uses Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo or whatever w/o PGP — which is most of the corporate world and normies.

I use Tuta for personal and it has the same problems (offline still works better than Proton I think). But my primary reasons for using Tuta are

1. I think they are more transparent about what they do than Proton
2. The alias email seems better, and
3. I don’t want to go in another corporate walled garden of office/email/calendar suite — I use Proton VPN

I have to use Google Workspace for work anyways so all my work email have offline access on Thunderbird.

Joplin for sure. But I personally use Obsidian because of the UI. I sync it with my server using Syncthing. All devices are synced to the server and not with each other so I have one source of Truth.

Yep. Behind Nginx Proxy Manager and for external access, I use Pangolin on VPS to reverse tunnel to my Home.

I used to pay for Ente as well but then I tried Immich & IMO is just so much better. It is THE Google Photos alternative with almost all the features. And as you said, you can get encryption with LUKSing your drive or partitions. I have automated my backups so I am pretty much at ease especially after the stable release.

All photos in Ente are E2EE — only client devices can decrypt it. Immich doesn’t have any encryption thus allowing anyone who manages the server to view your photos as they are. Immich is fully self-hosted while with Ente you have an option for paying Ente or self-host. I honestly prefer Immich because the features outweigh the encryption as I own the server myself and Ente is a bit complicated to setup — I think you even have to deploy the entire Ente Ecosystem Stack.

If you don’t want to pay Immich for backups, you can take care of off-site backups yourself using tools like rclone to your hard drive or any off-site storage of your choice. A paywall here would be not allowing offsite backups at all unless you pay Immich.