Copying this from Reddit (I still get the daily emails). Since I no longer post there, I figured I would ask here, and include my prediction: Will be more popular, possibly in stable release. Still won’t be able to rotate photos natively.
I was one of the first Immich core developers but had to leave a year ago due to a change in my job situation.
Just wanted to say that the team (especially Alex, the founder) are wonderful people and very dedicated to the project. When they don’t implement the features everyone wants, there is usually a very good reason, like security or architectural concerns. The philosophy behind the project is also to do things slowly but right.
I believe they continue focussing on robusness and bugfixing. A topic that we discussed a lot was e2e encryption. We really wanted to implement that, but it was very hard and back then would have compromised performance too much. I still think that e2e encryption will come at some point.
It’ll be good if it can be decrypted by the device itself. Almost perfect security tbh
The problem here is, that the server does a lot of image processing to generate various thumbnail sizes. This is the main reason images in the gallery load so fast when scrolling. But to archive this, the server needs to read the image which would not work with e2e.
Man, I sure hope they’re free of the container crutch.
What do you mean by container crutch?
Containers carry concerns around validation of container contents and, by extension, host contents. This has been well-discussed and is beyond the scope here.
But I do hope for an installation free of container mess.
But those are concerns for all containers, and not really an immich issue.
Just an idea: Maybe a simple photo editor would fit in nicely? Crop, rotate and adjust the colors/brightness/contrast.
And … please let me rotate videos that are accidentally 90 degrees off.
Maybe a simple photo editor would fit in nicely?
Basic photo editing capabilities are planned after stable release, this year :)
That’s what they said last year! And the year before!
Maybe not the stable part.
FWIW Ente just added photo editing
Ente is a great project but with immich as a competitor it has a hard time
What’s better about immich? I haven’t used either
Immich has traction. That’s why it stands out from all the other projects, imo.
I see. Thanks for the link! I might try out immich once they have a stable version, but I might try out ente before that
Does it not already have basic image editing? I can crop/rotate and apply some preset filters.


I disagree.
Yes, there is some editing capability in the app, but it doesn’t edit the image, it stores a new file in your local (non-immich) gallery. As I don’t sync this particular folder on my phone, I had to reupload it - and now have this image twice in immich, and one version with the wrong timestamp (now).
That’s barely any more helpful than downloading the image and editing it with another app.
I think this highlights the difficulty with “basic” image editing. For example, with G Photos or Mac Photos, or others, you can edit, and the edited version is what you’ll see by default going forward, but the original is still there. This is why I highlighted rotation. That’s strictly a metadata change, AFAIK. Last thing I read on their site was they were hung up getting it to work properly with HEIF.
I’m just learning about the software but all the tasks you listed (crop, rotate and adjust), can be done easily with imagemagick simple one-liners.
For example:
Convert in.jpg -rotate out.jpgOr
Using the auto-orient option or using jhead.
Why is it so hard for this app to implement it?
Former Immich dev here:
Even in the early days, we got hundreds of different feature requests that “can be done easily”. Even this example is a lot harder than you might think.
- Since all clients work differently, this probably has to be done server-side, requires a new endpoint, caching logic, client support.
- Immich supports a ton of file formats, the solution has to work with all of them.
- We must not lose meta data, quality or alter the image in some other way, Immich is a backup tool, file integrity is a top priority.
If you have an idea, how to tackle all of this, contact the dev team on Discord, they’re really helpful and will surely guide you through the process of implementing.
Forgive me if I’m being dumb… But is there a way to share a photo with my own editor, then save the result as an “edited” version of that asset? Currently if I send it to Snapseed, and save it, it will be placed in a different random folder
Where I wish it would be:
-
Somewhere where there are more customisationS of how it actually stores files.
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Somewhere where it’s possible to sync instances.
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A more sophisticated query system would be interesting.
For example if I want to see every picture with Joseph in it, that’s really easy. But what if I’d like to share those with Joseph along with the albums he’s in?
Similar to that would be a query by location and person. Or a query that includes two people.
It’ll be safe to host without extra software in front of it to make it read-only
I have no more wants of Immich, it does everything that I need lol
Manual ordering of images in albums is an absolute must before I adopt any image management system. It’s wierd to me that seemingly none of the FOSS systems support it (considering that most of us are datahoading control freaks).
Basic editing, plus full implementation in tag view woulf be nice. Also the mobile app needs a little work still. Oh, also pet recognition would be cool. All of those are planned, although the last one needs some external stuff before they can do it.
And a few other tweaks and QoL improvements here and there. But it’s really close.
Fluffy! No! It’s Aunt Marlin again!
Arf?
- Allow to share an Album over webdav
- On Android the possibikity to add a Picture to an Album even it is still not uploaded.
- Setup an Album to be synced permanently and full.
[Edit] Webdav:
- Deleted photos get the Album Tag removed.
- Possibility to upload to the webdav and get the photo into the album
- Rename a photo set the Photo title [setting]
- read write protect
I tried it briefly, but when I realized I could not easily sync a bunch of my pictures from server to new phone, I lost interest and went back to syncthing
Just out of curiosity, what’s the use case for having all your photos actually on the phone as opposed to remote access from your phone?
If the internet disappears or you lose access to it for some reason, you can still see your photos.
You can survive a day trip without access to your photos. We managed just fine before smartphones brought that practice into the mainstream.
Unless you’re a professional photographer who likes self hosting… 😝
A professional photographer doesn’t use cloud storage to store the GBs of RAW files from their shoots

Why not? They absolutely should be using something like Backblaze. In fact someone who has digital photos as their business would be dumb not to use cloud storage.
You’re not uploading to Backblaze or Immich or GPhotos or whatever as your primary backup storage. You’re dumping the SD cards, or saving RAW files directly, onto a fileserver or computer of some sort.
Nobody in their right mind would use Immich or GPhotos for that kind of thing, which is what this chain was about. Backblaze is a completely different scenario, for backing up data after the fact.
That would be an insane amount of phone storage. I don’t think a single available smart phone could sync an entire professional library of photos. Especially considering how large each photo is.
Could use folders per project. Come on… you’re still commenting on this ?
Man, you’re the one who came in and said Immich could be used by professional photographers. Don’t make dumbshit statements and then get pissy when others explain how you’re wrong.
You can still use Syncthing to pull photos back to the phone, Immich just stores them in organized directories as normal files.
Brand new Immich user here. Love the project and I hope it goes far!
Also maybe I’m not understanding, but the two complaints about it so far in this thread are not being able to sync photos to a phone and not being able to rotate photos and, I’m pretty sure I can do both?
From my testing today, you can only rotate a photo using the mobile app, and even then you have to save it locally and re-upload the rotated photo. Thus creating a separate, mostly duplicate photo! This is essentially a metadata orientation update, or it could be more. Immich seems to incorrectly orient a lot of photos that other applications have no problem with. The devs are aware of it and have been discussing this since at least 2022, possibly longer. There are also a number of feature/pull requests on the github page covering rotation, photo editing, cropping, etc. Personally, I don’t care about editing/cropping. I consider those edits which should result in a separate asset, possibly linked back to the original.
For me, this is probably the biggest missing feature for Immich. They’ve done some really amazing things in the past couple years, but this seemingly basic feature remains missing.
In my mobile app, I can select a photo > edit > crop, and get rotate options there. Does that do what you’re looking for? I can’t confirm right now since I’m not home and haven’t exposed it beyond my home network yet, and haven’t tried it from the web interface. I agree though, as I continue to use it, rotating will be a common use case and I’d hope it handles it gracefully.
Yes you can do all of that, but it’s saved as a separate asset that is not related in any way to the original. That’s the issue. Also, it would be nice to be able to do these things in the web app as well.
As for syncing, if all your phones are logged into Immich as the same user, you wouldn’t have any issues syncing photos. I don’t thing Immich currently allows sharing assets between users. That can be troublesome for family albums.
Can’t rotate or do basic edits in web app, dead to me.
Also can’t really sync and share with rest of household. Auto sync to phones is also a must.
I was seriously unimpressed with its features, and I’m not bothering with it again anytime soon.
Syncing to all of my household’s phones was one of my main requirements. So far its working, maybe its been recently updated.
Are they all your phones, or different house members? Can you “pool” your photos together?
We’ve been doing this with all our phones for a long time using nextcloud. I’d like to use a more photo-oriented app, but the last I tried it, it just wasn’t there yet.
I’m still figuring it out. But at the very least, my SO and I both have phones with the Immich app, and auto sync our photos folders to it, and we can both see all of the photos that have been synced.
I believe it will transform into a basketball
Word
Libreoffice write
Vim
Their facial recognition is really good! Makes organizing photos a breeze. Immich is by far the best software currently. But hopefully the setup becomes less of a hassle.












