This question has been answered. Please stop trying to repeat information that has already been said many times before. Everything in this thread is in good faith, I am here to learn, so I will make mistakes. Furthermore, if you want to contribute something new, please read the entire post to avoid misunderstanding the purpose of this post.
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.
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.
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
Immich is just much nicer, i can make an album and share it with my wife and she can see that on her phone right away since I set her phone to use immich as well.
I used to use nextcloud for images but it was kind of weird and didn’t have a lot of the features, then randomly one day while I was at a work event nextcloud just decided to start syncing everything to my phone and killed my battery.
After that I tried photo prisim but that didn’t have a proper sync app and I had to use other work arounds and I ended up just not liking the way it sorted my photos, immich to me just makes sense and was much easier to setup.
Also like everyone else has mentioned being hardware agnostic is great, I can plug my phone in to a monitor with a keyboard and mouse and vpn in to a VM on my server and I have a full fledged desktop experience where I can play games or edit videos and photos
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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!
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 think selfhost is more useful in a multi-user scenario, for my personal needs I also love Syncthing.
I agree that self hosting is useful for things that require lots of storage or processing power, but there are more reasons to self host than that. For me, it’s more that I want control of certain services, and that I want a central place to manage them from. For example, I personally host an Immich server on a local rig in my home along with a number of other services that don’t require enormous amounts of storage or processing power.
Home Assistant, Jellyfin and the Arr stack, Audiobookshelf, Koel, Immich, etc. Things like Jellyfin require large amounts of space, sure. But things like the Home Assistant, Arr stack, Audiobookshelf, and Koel are more for convenience than anything else. Going back to the Immich example, this provides me with a way to centralize my family’s photos while on our local network, or a VPN, and allows us to share them publicly with others using explicit links. It keeps our personal photos out of the corporate cloud and provides mostly the same functionality as though I were using an alternative mainstream product. That and if someone yeets my phone into the ocean for some reason, I still have all my photos.
Having explicit control of these services and the underlying content is probably more of a reason to self host than anything else for me. S3-type bucket storage and spot processing power is relatively cheap these days. Privacy and control is not.
and allows us to share them publicly with others using explicit links.
That’s something I hadn’t considered. I’m somewhat used to everything being completely local, no exceptions. It’s why I started selfhosting so late, I never saw much of a point to it. I also don’t feel completely comfortable opening any part of my home internet to the public, but I’m sure there’s safe ways of going about it.
Another bias of mine is having a lot of compartmentalization. For example, none of my desktop account credentials are stored on my phone’s password manager, and vice versa. If one device is compromised, I want to isolate the risk as much as I can. That also means that if I were to ever set up a movie library, for example, I would want to keep those isolated per-device as well.
Backups are a bit of a special case. You can either selfhost an automatic cloud backup, or use something simple like a USB stick you manually backup to. Besides that, though, I would argue you maintain more control over software that doesn’t rely on an external device to begin with. I gave examples, such as Aves, Joplin, or Feeder. If those are on my phone only (and properly backed up), I maintain full control knowing that I don’t need to rely on my own server at home to manage the data that I have in my pocket.
This has helped me see some new benefits of selfhosting, though. I’ve spent my whole life without a SIM card, so it isn’t always easy finding a network (especially a trustworthy one) to connect to on the go to connect to my server with. Even in the moments I could connect to a network, they had heavy censorship (blocked VPNs and certain IP addresses). That’s why I like having everything on-device.
They’re meant to be run on a local server ie whatever other computer you have that runs 24/7
Why would you need a home server in addition to your day to day desktop computer? I leave my desktop on at all times because it’s a Plex/ErsatzTV server, HomeAssistant server, web server for various utilities I’ve written, etc. It works great.
I’ve made a point not to perpetually leave my home computer on simply because frequent restarts are healthy for it. Another reason is compartmentalization. I would want to keep my selfhosted server separate from where I game or browse the internet, if at least to keep it more secure.
Why are frequent restarts healthy? Do you mean at a hardware level or for the OS?
Both. If your hardware isn’t designed like a server to run 24/7 it can be unhealthy for it, especially if it isn’t properly maintained. It can cause wear to it. As far as the OS, restarting is good to clear caches, fully install some software, and keep the system sanitary overall.
Sounds like you should get a basic low power linux box going!
Powercycling is not healthy lol
I found this article explaining some of the benefits. Let me know if I’m wrong, I’m always open to learning!
The misunderstanding seems to be between software and hardware. It is good to reboot Windows and some other operating systems because they accumulate errors and quirks. It is not good to powercycle your hardware, though. It increases wear.
I’m not on an OS that needs to be rebooted, I count my uptime in months.
I don’t want you to pick up a new anxiety about rebooting your PC, though. Components are built to last, generally speaking. Even if you powercycled your PC 5 times daily you’d most likely upgrade your hardware long before it wears out.
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.
In immich I can open the world map and select photos i took in Hungary and Colorado without having to manually tag and manually locate them, and I have thousands of photos (hundreds of gigs of videos backed up from my phone as well) from the last 25 years taken across the world and can do this seamlessly by simply uploading them and having my server run a heuristic to automatically do this from the photograph metadata, and then proceed to share them with a self-hosted link to my spouse to enjoy.
Can I do this with NextCloud or on my phone without killing the battery?
Can I do this with NextCloud or on my phone without killing the battery?
I suppose not. That’s a fair point. Although I will mention, if your camera supports it, location metadata can be embedded automatically. Aves and many other gallery apps support viewing photos with location data on the map.
I don’t use gallery apps on my phone because I don’t have the space for terabytes of photos and videos on my phone, but my server sitting in my closet does.
So Aves and other gallery apps are useless to me, and I’ll stick with whatever native gallery app exists ob whatever phone i use.
I can remotely view my entire gallery from abroad with Immich (which also happens to allow me to sync photos), and save the space on my phone for more photos.
It does everything Google charges money for in Google photos, but for free. NextCloud and random gallery apps offers nothing similar.
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.
Appreciate this post OP, as I’ve wondered similar at times when not wanting to fuss with another machine for self-hosting (as often it’s not the case that I could run the server software on my main system).
@[email protected] I run my own server for a simple reason: it means owning my social media presence.
I own my content, my audience, and who I federate with.
