Selfhosting is useful when you either need a lot of storage or a lot of processing power. For example, Kiwix is useful to selfhost on a server because a lot of its content can take up terabytes of storage, which a phone may not have. LLMs are also useful to selfhost because they require a degree of processing power that, again, a phone may not have.
In both cases, there is also a need for perpetual access. If you simply hosted an LLM on your home computer, it wouldn’t be very useful to access from your phone since your computer won’t be running all the time. So, a separate always-on server is needed.
However, there are some selfhosted software that I don’t see a use for. For example, Immich. Immich requires to be run on a server to function, but a lot of (or even all) of its functions are things that could reasonably done entirely on-device. Aves combined with some automatic backup solution such as Nextcloud gets (from what I can tell) most of the functionality Immich offers. Obviously, some features like AI image tagging are missing, but you get the point. AI image tagging is also something that could be run on-device as well, since it’s mostly lightweight (iPhones are capable of it). Having a setup like that also comes with the benefit of automatic backups being completely optional, rather than required.
There’s no reasonable need for extra storage or extra processing power needed for that use case, from what I can tell. (Disclaimer: I haven’t actually used Immich before, so this is speculation. I apologize if I’m missing something obvious) There’s a lot of other selfhosted tools like spotDL which have a selfhosted web UI, but no GUI that can be installed outside of a web browser.
I guess my question is why there are so many selfhosted tools that unnecessarily require being run on a separate device. I do understand the legitimate use cases some of them have, but others seem better off on-device airgapped. This especially became an issue trying to find a notes app for Android that requires no account and runs fully locally, or an RSS reader that loads from the device itself. I found Joplin and Feeder or Read You as the software for each of those. I don’t like “server-based” selfhosting for things that could be done from the device itself.
I’m sorry if this turned into a rant. If someone could help me understand, I would appreciate that very much.
Cheers!
Edit: The comparison here isn’t between selfhosting and using a cloud provider. The comparison here is between selfhosting on a server and running explicitly on-device (besides where extra storage or processing power is required)
Answer
So that nobody has to dig through the comments for answers, this is what I’ve learned: In the case of Immich, its purpose isn’t designed to be a photo gallery. It’s designed to be a more polished backup solution, designed explicitly for photos and not general files. While Nextcloud could be used to backup photos, it’s not as focused on photos as Immich, and so it isn’t as nice to use for that purpose. Immich also allows you to share photos with a link, rather than relying on a cloud provider to do that for you. There’s also another benefit to selfhosting that I hadn’t entirely realized, which is availability across devices. Some things like an eBook library may not take up much space, but it’s convenient to not have to sync manually (or automatically) across devices, and instead access it from a central server. That same logic is true for RSS readers as well, since it’s inconvenient to manually add and sync feeds across devices. Syncing across devices can be done with something like Syncthing in some cases, but not all, and so that’s where selfhosting can be useful.
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Oh man. Of all the self-hosted projects to not grasp, you picked the darling.
The creator of Immich had the same use case that got me in to self hosting:
- A new family with child.
- A whole lot of photos and video to share between the spouse and with extended family.
- Ballooning Google (One) photos costs, to which I asked: am I going to pay this forever? Storage also caps out at 2 tb, which we are using more than.
- A growing discontent with the idea of every family moment being harvested by a tech company I do not like.
At the core - Immich allows me a continuity of service and saves money while keeping spousal approval at the required levels.
For example, Immich. Immich requires to be run on a server to function, but a lot of (or even all) of its functions are things that could reasonably done entirely on-device
And you don’t share your photos with family, friends, or the public? Or is your sharing solution to spam people with MMS text messages?
Obviously, some features like AI image tagging are missing, but you get the point
No, I don’t. If Immich provides a feature your phone doesn’t, then it’s not a good example of something that doesn’t need to be self-hosted.
But let’s talk about this.
I change phones every few years (as infrequently as I can, but until Framework starts making cell phones my options are limited). I’ve had cell phones break. I haven’t yet lost one, but I can imagine it happening. Keeping all of my eggs in one easily broken, easily lost device over which I have increasingly less control sounds really stupid. But we can back the phone data, and that doesn’t require self-hosting, as you say.
So when does self-hosting make sense? For me, it comes down two cases: (1) data sharing, and (2) multi-device use. The first one accounts for maybe 80% of my self-hosting. I really hate cell phones as computing devices. I hate typing on them, their absurdly small screens, and limited app selections. So my other case for self-hosting is so I can do most of my work on a desktop or laptop, yet still have access on a phone when I need to. Oftentimes, there’s no mobile app for the data I want to access, or there is but app developers are using some stupid bespoke data format that nobody rose uses; so be self-hosting, I can get at and interact with that information from not only my mobile device, but from any device. I can borrow my wife’s laptop if I didn’t being mine; I can borrow my BIL’s desktop when we’re visiting them. I’m not forced to use a tiny screen and crappy hunt-and-peck on screen keyboard on my phone.
I’m interested in other examples you have; it sounds as if many self-host solutions perplex you, beyond Immich - what are they? I’m honestly curious. We know Immich adds value (for some people) through AI tagging, and that alone justifies self-hosting Immich for those people. What other software do you think it’s silly to self-host?
I have 113k images going back two decades. The screenshot above doesn’t include RAW files, with those included I’m around 2 terabytes of total storage.
- Immich is in fact a photo album, and a damn good one at that.
- Immich keeps google’s grubby paws off my photos. I don’t need or want anyone datamining every precious memory I have in order to modify my behavior to their benefit.
- Immich shares photos between my wife and my phones.
- Immich ensures that if I lose my phone, my photos aren’t lost.
- Immich lets me easily re edit and re-export RAW files without creating duplicates or losing metadata
- Immich lets me conveniently share photos with friends and family without requiring them to have an account anywhere.
Mostly I self-host things when I want data synchronized between multiple devices, or I don’t want to lose it in the event I lose the device it was created on.
Also, like, phone screens are tiny and typing on them is terrible? Why would you want to do everything on your phone?
Immich requires to be run on a server to function, but a lot of (or even all) of its functions are things that could reasonably done entirely on-device. Aves combined with some automatic backup solution such as Nextcloud gets (from what I can tell) most of the functionality Immich offers.
How would you backup Immich on device?
And if you backup to Nextcloud than you already have a served?
So you are arguing that having a file server is enough? And processing is done on client side?
That would be in this case very inefficient.
- You would need to have all the data on the Client or transfer all the data to the client once you load it.
- You device has to do all the processing which would lead to lower battery life.
- How do you handle multiple Users? Giving partially access to the Filesystem?
I could come up with other points but this should give you an idea. Yes, for some use cases a server-client approach does not make sense but for a dedicated photo backup and indexer it absolutely does.
I think collaboration is another thing that’s missing in your answer. Of course synchronization would be one main thing for me to use a photo gallery or note taking app across devices, since I’m often accessing stuff from my phone and my laptop. But I also like to share photos with my relatives and friends, I have shared calendars with my wife to organize our lives. I collaborate on projects and collaborative edit text documents. And sometimes I keep notes and small snippets on technical details mainly for myself, but also share that with the internet, for other people to learn how to install some software or customize it to a niche use-case. And while some of that could be done by separate applications as well, I often use one generic self-hosted platform and have that do everything, disregarding if some of the job doesn’t really need the features. It’s a balance. I’m also sometimes wasting resources and in the end I realize I never needed a self-hosted solution and I would have been better off with a simple and local phone app.
A reason I self-host stuff is privacy. When I host my data it’s my data. It’s not owned and kept by a billion dollar company somewhere, that is willing to sell it to make a quick buck.
So it’s my way of making sure that my data really is my data and that it is only shared with those I want to share it with. Some applications require a server component to achive this (eg Immich), so that’s why I self-host those.
What you have missed is the ability to run what ever you need, self hosting is more then just backups and sync.
Some self hosting to self reliant, nextcloud can do way more then just file sync. For example I use it for calendar and contact sync, photo and file backup from my phone, an office suit, RSS server.
Lots of people mentioning collaboration / multiple users, yet all your replies seem to completely ignore this aspect. I’m guessing you might live alone and are struggling to imagine some very common use cases here.
Agreed. Do I expect my mom to manually plug in the usb flash? She ain’t have slightest idea of what a file is. Same goes for Nextcloud everything and Syncthing. Setup and done is Immich. The lead dev of Immich explicitly mention his motivation was to make it easy to backup and share pics with his wife and child.
I think selfhost is more useful in a multi-user scenario, for my personal needs I also love Syncthing.
To me, the appeal is that my workflow depends less on my computer and more on my ability to connect to a server that handles everything for me. Workstation, laptop or phone? Doesn’t matter, just connect to the right IPs and get working. Linux is, of course, the holy grail of interoperability, and I’m all Linux. With a little bit of set up, I can make a lot of things talk to each other seamlessly. SMB on Windows is a nightmare but on Linux if I set up SSH keys then I can just open a file manager and type sftp://<hostname> and now I’m browsing that machine as if it was a local folder. I can do a lot of work from my genuinely-trash laptop because it’s the server that’s doing the heavy lifting
TL;DR -
My workflow becomes “client agnostic” and I value that a lot
I agree with this comment. As mentioned as answer in the post, to have a backup of these things is a big reason why I chose to selfhost. I had to switch devices (and operating systems) too many times. Moving data around everytime would be a hassle. To have all the important stuff not only stored but also organized and easy to access is very convenient and makes me stop worrying to accidentially lose my phone for example.
Thanks reasonable! That does make me realize how different my workflow is. My philosophy is compartmentalizing everything. What I do on my phone stays on my phone. What I do on my desktop stays on my desktop. What I do on my laptop stays on my laptop. I’ve never really had the need for anything more until now. Then again, I’ve also never had the resources to selfhost until now.
I think the point with all of these is that they are “cloud”-based. Except instead of the cloud being someone else’s computer, it’s your own. Let’s take Immich, for example. Sure I could keep all my photos on my phone. But what if I lose or break my phone? What if I have an actual camera with an SD card and I want to offload those photos? Self-hosting lets me keep a backup. I can set up a server with redundant drives that itself backs up to a server in another location with its own separate drives. Thus, I have my own safe cloud storage.
Sure, and I agree backups are important. I still don’t like that Immich requires another server to function in the first place. It would be difficult to recommend Immich as a gallery app to someone who doesn’t have experience in selfhosting. I personally backup my phone to my own USB stick every few days or so, that way if my phone is ever lost or stolen I still have a backup without the need for a server.
It would be difficult to recommend Immich as a gallery app to someone who doesn’t have experience in selfhosting.
You already have plenty of responses, but immich is not an gallery app. I’m in the process of migrating my photo libraries to immich and it’s 20+ years of memories. Some are originally taken by film camera and then scanned, others are old enough that camera phones just didn’t exist and we had “compact” digital cameras. Then there’s photos taken with DSLR and drone and obviously all of the devices have changed multiple times over the years, so relying on just a single device is just not going to work over time.
All of those require some other system to store, organize, back up and enjoy than the device itself. And, as I have family, storing them on just my desktop would mean that no one else around would have easy access to them. And with immich I can easily share photos around when I carry DSLR with me in a family gathering or whatever.
And then there’s the obvious matter of having enough storage. Even my desktop doesn’t have a spare terabyte right now to store everything, I need the hardware anyways, so it just makes sense to keep them separated from my workstation which I can now do whatever I want with without worrying I’d lose any of those precious memories. And for the server part, I’m having one around anyways for pihole, home assistant, nextcloud to store/back up other data and so on, so for me it’s the most convenient approach to run immich server on there too.
And for the backup side of things. I’ve tried manual backups with various stuff over the years. It’s just not going to work for me. I either forget or life gets in the way or something other happens and then I’m several days or weeks behind the ‘schedule’. With dedicated server I don’t have to do anything, everything is running automatically at the background while I’m sleeping or doing something else more interesting than copying over a bunch of files.
So the difference here is you are manually doing a thing for your backups. Using a self hosted server and something like immich will seamlessly do it for you. If you drop your phone in the toilet and it breaks, the photos you took since your last manual backup would be saved.
Immich isnt meant to be a photo gallery viewer primarily, it is meant to be a self hosted photo backup service to replace stuff like icloud or google photos. So yeah, dont recommend it as a gallery viewer, recommend it as a selfhosted image backuo service.
I self host a jellyfin service on my nas, and keep all my movies and shows on that nas. I wouldnt be able to fit all that stuff on my phone.
I worked in an office that was paying out the ass for google drive. Setting up a self hosted nextcloud was a great solution and saved them a bunch of money, and still worked as a hands off “cloud solution”
If you dont want to run a separate machine to self host some services thats fine, you dont need to do it. its not for everyone. But plenty of people have reasonable motives for doing it.
I personally backup my phone to my own USB stick every few days or so
Is that automated? It sounds kind of tedious, and it would be easy to lose data if something goes wrong in between those few days.
Some of the motivation behind self hosting is that there is one source of truth that is easy to manage and make backups for (a server or servers). Android backups in particular are kind of notoriously fragile (especially if you’re avoiding Google services) so it’s simpler to have the data stored on a server. Then I can wipe or lose my phone with impunity without really worrying about losing data, because it’s handled elsewhere.
Nevertheless, you might like the idea of local-first software which is kind of a hybrid between local only software, and self-hosting (or cloud hosting).
Is that automated?
If I left the USB stick plugged in constantly, but then it wouldn’t be very useful I guess.
I’ve only recently started selfhosting on my own, so I am still quite new.
Nevertheless, you might like the idea of local-first software which is kind of a hybrid between local only software, and self-hosting (or cloud hosting).
I’ll check it out, thank you!
I use Immich because I have multiple devices and multiple people uploading photos to it , so we can all organize together.
Self hosting anything also gives you a lot of practice and experience (and confidence) to also self hosting anything for others, an important skill for many to have in order to have a more distributed internet.
I use Immich because I have multiple devices and multiple people uploading photos to it , so we can all organize together.
Would something like Syncthing work for this instead?
I personally use Syncthing for backing up gamesaves to my home server and it works great. While it would technically work for this application, it would be significantly more work to set up and maintain for photo management than just kicking up an Immich Docker container. Go check out their docs if you haven’t already, it’s pretty sweet how easy it is to manage stuff with Immich
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In your example Immich is an alternative to Nextcloud that is more specialized. If you already run a Nextcloud there is no real need to run Immich indeed. But in reverse you might not need all the features Nextcloud provides and Immich would be a more streamlined alternative for sharing and storing images.
If every app had their own selfhosted backup solution, it wouldn’t be very convenient. I’d think it better to run Nextcloud to back everything up than to deal with setting each backup solution up individually. Is there a major benefit to Immich that I’m missing?
If all you need is a photo backup solution (and for many people that is true) then Immich is a far more polished and less janky option. Nextcloud is a typical “jack of all trades, master of none” type of software.
That’s a good point, and I agree. I still wish Immich could function as an on-device photo app, with selfhosted backups being optional.
On device isn’t always ideal. I don’t use immich because i don’t have a large photo library. But I do use komga. Nextcloud can sort and manage epub/pdf like komga but as poVoq said, the specialized solution is superior
This point is where on device app is not the ideal situation, for me at least. These apps exist. Tachiyomi and the resultant forks can import a local library. And frankly even a somewhat massive local library can fit on a cheap SD card
The point of the server is portability. With this I have portability across my devices. My library, reading status, metadata, etc is available on all devices. I can read a book on my ereader, close it, the status is synced. I can pick up from my laptop and the same thing occurs. I can pick up from my phone, download the book to my device, and keep reading while I’m away from home. If I wanted to I could open remote access to my server and avoid the need for downloading the books but that’s a whole thing
I don’t think it would make sense to run a server solely for this but it’s a service that doesn’t take much in terms of resources and I read a lot.
I run both … nextcloud is very inconvenient for finding stuff and slow in loading. I still use nextcloud to sync, but immich for tagging and displaying, because it’s much faster and better in UI etc.
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.
There are three reasons that I can think of:
- Privacy
- Collaboration
- Accessibility / cost
Privacy. This is obvious. People don’t want their private information to be sold by corporations or scraped by AI.
Collaboration To share information with others, while maintaining point 1, people have to self host. Say, you want to archive a bunch of photos for personal viewing then you can store them anywhere you like. But if you want to share them with family, a self hosted solution is the way to go.
Accessibility / cost People want to do things for free. Many applications offer free version or demo, but features are often limited and you can’t really customize them to your own needs. In addition, applications often adopt a subscription model these days and people don’t like that.
I mentioned in the edit: I’m not asking why things should be selfhosted instead of run on a cloud provider, I’m asking why things are selfhosted on a server that could be run entirely on-device. The latter I argue provides more privacy and less cost. Again, there are some cases as I mentioned in the post where selfhosting on a server is useful (storage or processing power), but I keep seeing a lot of server-based selfhosting that could instead be run on the device itself.
To answer your question, most people don’t have just one device. Do you have only one device? You must have at least a desktop computer and a smartphone? What if you want to have something stored in your computer when you are not at home?
Music for example. If I don’t want to pay Spotify or whatever, and I want to listen to my music on my phone at work and on my computer at home. Other than making two full copies of the entire music library, I think I have to store them on a 3rd location then share it to my two devices.
If I don’t listen to music at home, then you’re right, there’s no reason to self host anything. I can just store all songs on my phone.
The purpose of most of these apps is to be able to use them on multiple devices. If I had immich entirely running on my phone (this is not actually feasible regardless) how do i access my images from my computer.
Also many people have multiple users. A family could have all their images on one immich server and be able to share images with each other easily.
On jellyfin for example, I can play any of my media on someone elses TV as long as they have Chromecast. Not possible if its all just kept locally in a folder on a computer
I have two devices. How do I view photos from both, together in one library, without running something like Immich on a third device?
That’s a fair point, and I don’t suppose Nextcloud or Syncthing would be quite as useful or as designed for photos. Thank you for helping me understand!
