I host a lot of things on my servers. This one has been long overdue - and delayed when my monolith's SSD died abruptly. I have a replacement incoming, as well as an 8TB server-grade hard disk on its way. With this, and my Wasabi S3 storage, I feel ready to finally replace the biggest pain point of my digital life - Google Photos
Complaints
Google Photos makes space management hard. From any of my devices, it is quasi-impossible to delete images on my drive without also deleting them from my devices. This is, in my opinion, entrapment. Forcing you to spend money on those extra 100GB to keep your digital life there on Google Photos. And with me having a new phone, my photos are a lot higher quality and take more space. While I have plenty of storage on my phone, I have none left on Google Photos.
And thus, out of principle (i hate being trapped by a company in their ecosystem), I'm saying goodbye to Google Photos.
Exfiltration
Thanks to EU regulation (if I recall correctly), Google is forced to provide a "get my data out" button which is straightforward to use. You get to it through photos.google.com/settings and finding "Export your data". You then request a takeout. Here's an example:
Installing Immich
I'm tempted to install Immich inside Kubernetes and access a chunk of the 8TB disk through NFS. Alternatively I could dump it on the monolith... I will probably do the latter as I would rather upgrade the RAM in the separate micro PC than start upgrading the RAM in my K3S cluster which is an expensive rabbit hole to go down. - past Alex
Well, what I ended up doing was attaching a 3TB disk to one of my nodes. In the future, the 8TB disk can go to another node so I have a semblance of redundancy. Speaking of, read how and why I setup everything the way I did here. Now my cluster has an extra 3TB, so Immich can go directly on there using the provided Helm chart and have the PV on the large disk instead of filling up the smaller internal SSDs.
I also had to install cloudnativepg which merits its own blogpost in the near future. Immich uses the postgres database to keep track of everything I upload, as well as the different users and albums.
Finally, it was just a matter of initialising Immich and creating the users for myself and my dad, then I had my amazing Google Photos alternative with more storage than I know what to do with.
I am paying for Wasabi anyway for all my Longhorn backups, and as the Immich PVs are all managed through Longhorn, they use the same backup schedule and I don't have any more work to do. Which is the reason I finally went with everything-on-kubernetes instead of NFS storage external to the cluster.
And here's my web UI! Not to worry, there is a mobile app which does the heavy lifting of synchronising my camera library with the server whenever I'm on wifi.
