December 5, 2025
Clouds cry, selfies fly
Self-hosting my photos with Immich
Google shut the door; DIY photo fans crowned Immich the new favorite
TLDR: Google changed access rules, so a user switched to self-hosted Immich and fixed imports with a helper app. Comments cheer Immich as better than big-brand photo clouds, while skeptics push for easier shared albums and debate tiny home servers versus internet tunnels for accessing it.
When Google tightened access and broke an old sync tool, one user went full “bring-your-own-cloud” and set up Immich at home. They spun it up on a mini PC, split it into virtual machines with Proxmox (software that lets you run multiple computers on one box), and hid it behind Tailscale (a private internet tunnel). The import saga had drama: the official command-line uploader kept timing out while the server made thumbnails and did face detection, but a third‑party helper, immich-go, paused those jobs and sailed through Google Takeout zips. iPhone app installed, auto‑backup on—minor confusion over “Live Photos” vs “Recent,” cue crowd suggestions.
The comments turned into a victory parade—and a hardware flex-off. “Immich is better in every way than Google Photos,” cheered WD‑42, with shadowpho bragging it hums on a $200 laptop, while cuu508 went super‑tiny with a NanoPi and a Cloudflare tunnel for remote access. It’s tunnel wars: VPN vs cloud tunnel. Then a spicy twist: drekipus wants selective sharing so not every picture ends up on the phone—basically a “family truce” album for couples. Meanwhile, stavros says Immich brought back the joy of photos thanks to easy natural‑language search. The vibe: DIY cloud is hot, polish still debated, and the memes write themselves—“My phone is not a hard drive,” “Google closed a door, Immich opened a window.”
Key Points
- •Google’s OAuth scope changes in March 2025 broke gphotos-sync, prompting a migration to a self-hosted solution.
- •Immich was deployed on an ASRock DeskMini X600 mini PC via Proxmox in a VM with 500 GB storage, 4 cores, and 4 GB RAM.
- •NixOS was used to enable Immich; external access was restricted to a Tailscale VPN using tailscale serve, MagicDNS, and TLS.
- •Initial imports via Immich CLI were unreliable due to server background jobs and lack of Google Takeout JSON metadata support.
- •Using the immich-go tool resolved import issues by pausing background tasks and supporting Google Takeout archives.