The appeal for me to use immich is the AI search.

I have over 100,000 photos I have taken. I can do a search of “blue sky with pink clouds and a moon” and it will show me the photo I want.

The way I did it before would take me 2-3 days of looking at every photo one by one to find that photo.

The other benefit of the server is I can access all these apps from my laptop, phone, desktop, or using my VPN from anywhere in the world.

The one that was way more useful then expected is immich. I have over 100,000 photos I took during my life and it usually takes me DAYS to find a specific picture I need.

I installed immich and let it AI scan everything for a week or something. Now I can search for something specific like “it’s a black square in the middle of the photo and has a little knob on it” and it finds me the photo I need.

It’s also cool to see photos of people, organized by the individual by searching their name or clicking on their face.