Alex from Immich here.

We are entering the last few weeks of 2023, and it has been quite a year for Immich. The project has grown so much in terms of users, developers, features, maturity, and the community around it. When I started working on Immich, it was simply a challenge for myself and an opportunity to learn new technologies, crafting something fun and useful for my wife during my free time to satisfy my urge to build and create things. I never thought it would become so popular and help so many people. At the end of the day, all we have is memory. I am proud that the team and I have created something to make storing and viewing those precious memories easier without restrictions and without sacrificing our privacy. As the year closes, here’s a recap of everything the project accomplished in 2023.

Milestones

• Public shared links
• Favorites page
• Immich turned 1
• Material Design 3 on the mobile app
• Auto-link LivePhotos server-side
• iOS background backup
• Explore page
• CLIP search
• Search by metadata
• Responsive web app
• Archive page
• Asset descriptions
• 10,000 stars on GitHub
• Manage auth devices
• Map view
• Facial recognition, clustering, searching, renaming, and person management
• Partner sharing and unifying timeline between partners' users
• Custom storage label
• XMP sidecar reading
• RAW file formats
• Justified layout on the web
• Memories
• Multi-select via SHIFT
• Android Motion Photos
• 360° Photos
• Album description
• Album performance improvements (time buckets)
• Video hardware transcoding
• Slideshow mode on the web
• Configuration file
• External libraries
• Trash page
• Custom theme
• Asset Stacking
• 20,000 stars on GitHub
• Shared album activity and comments
• CLI v2
• Down to 5 containers (from 8)

Fun Statistics

• We have gone from the release version 1.41.0 to 1.90.0 at the time of writing. On average, we see a release every 7 days.
• According to GitHub's metrics, the immich-server container image has been pulled almost 4 million times.
• According to mobile app store metrics, we have 22,000 installations on Android and 6700 installation units on iOS (opt-in only).
• Immich is making around $1200/month on average from donations. (Thank you all so much!)
• We were guests on two podcasts:
  • Self-hosted
  • The Vergecast
• There are over 4,500 members on the Discord server.
• We have over 22,000 stars on the main GitHub repository, gaining 15,000 stars since January 2023.

Diving into the next year, the team will continue to build on the foundation we have laid out over the past year, implementing more advanced features for searching, organizing, and sharing between users. Bugs will continue to be squashed and conquered. “Shit Alex wrote'' code will continue to be replaced by beautiful, clean code from Jason, Zack, Boet, Daniel, Osorin, Mert, Fynn, Marty, Martin, and Jonathan. The team has my eternal gratitude for creating a welcoming environment for new contributors, helping, teaching, and learning from each other. I’ve realized that hardly a day has gone by where the team hasn’t been in communication about Immich related topics over the past year.

My long-term goal is to help hone Immich into a diamond in the FOSS space, where the UI, UX, development experiences, documentation, and quality are at a high standard while remaining free for everybody to use.

I hope you enjoy Immich and have a happy and peaceful holiday.

Immich recently got some good recognition when getting to the front page of HackerNews, which helped to let more people know about the project's existence. The project will help more and more people find a solution to control the privacy of their most precious moments. And with the gain in popularity and recognition, we have gotten new users and more questions from the community than ever.

I want to express my gratitude to all the contributors and the community who have been tremendously helpful to new users' questions and provided technical support.

Below are the highlights of new features we added to the application over the past month, along with countless bug fixes and improvements across the board, from developer experience to resource optimization and UI/UX improvement. I hope you find these topics as exciting as I am.

Highlights​

• Memories feature.
• Facial recognition improvements.
• Improvements on multi selection behavior on the web.
• Shortcuts for common actions on the web.
• Support viewer for 360-panorama photos.

Memories feature​

We've added the memory feature on the mobile app, so you can reminisce about your past memories.

Facial recognition improvements​

Over the past few releases, we have added many UI improvements to the facial recognition feature to help you manage the recognized people better. Some of the highlights:

Choose a new feature photo for a person.​

Hide and show faces.​

You can now select irrelevant faces to hide them. The hidden faces won’t be displayed in search results and the people section in the info panel.

Merge faces.​

This is useful when you have multiple faces of the same person in your photos, and you want to merge them into one.

We also added a nifty mechanism that when naming a face, similar names will prompt you a merge face option for the convenience.

Improvements on multi selection behavior on the web​

We have added a new multi selection behavior on the web to help you select multiple items easier. You can now select a range of photos and videos by holding the Shift key.

Shortcuts for common actions on the web.​

Some of us only navigate the world and the web with a keyboard (looking at you, Vim and Emacs users). So it would take away the sacred weapon of choice to require many clicks to perform repetitive actions. So we added quick shortcuts for the following action on the web.

Support viewer for 360-panorama photos.​

Photos with the EXIF property of ProjectionType will now have a special viewer on the web to view all the angles of the panorama.

The thumbnail of the 360 degrees panoramas will have a special icon on the top right of the thumbnail

Panorama in the detail view

Thank you, and I am asking for your support for the project. I hope to be a full-time maintainer of Immich one day to dedicate myself to the project as my life's work for the community and my family. You can find the support channels below:

• Monthly donation via GitHub Sponsors
• One-time donation via GitHub Sponsors
• Liberapay
• buymeacoffee
• Bitcoin: 1FvEp6P6NM8EZEkpGUFAN2LqJ1gxusNxZX
• Give a project a star - the contributors love gazing at the stars and seeing their creations shining in the sky.

Join our friendly Discord to talk and discuss Immich, tech, or anything

Cheer!

Until next time!

Alex

I am back with another update on Immich. It has been only a month since my last update (May 18th, 2023), but it seems forever. I think the rapid releases of Immich and the amount of work make the perspective of time change in Immich’s world. We have some exciting updates that I think you will like.

Before going into detail, on behalf of the core team, I would like to thank all of you for loving Immich and contributing to the project. Thank you for helping me make Immich an enjoyable alternative solution to Google Photos so that you have complete control of your data and privacy. I know we are still young and have a lot of work to do, but I am confident we will get there with help from the community. I appreciate all of you from the bottom of my heart!

And now, to the exciting part, what is new in Immich’s world?

• Initial support for existing gallery.
• Memory feature.
• Support XMP sidecar.
• Support more raw formats.
• Justified layout for web timeline and blurred thumbnail hash.
• Mechanism to host machine learning on a completely different machine.

Support for existing gallery​

I know this is the most controversial feature when it comes to Immich’s way of ingesting photos and videos. For many users, having to upload photos and videos to Immich is simply not working. We listen, discuss, and digest this feature internally more than you imagine because it is not a simple feature to tackle while keeping the performance and the user experience at the top level, which is Immich’s primary goal.

Thankfully, we have many great contributors and developers that want to make this come true. So we came up with an initial implementation of this feature in the form of a supporting read-only gallery.

To be concise, Immich can now read in the gallery files, register the path into the database, and then generate necessary files and put them through Immich’s machine learning pipeline so you can use all the goodness of Immich without the need to upload them. Since this is the initial implementation, some actions/behavior are not yet supported, and we aim to build toward them in future releases, namely:

• Assets are not automatically synced and must instead be manually synced with the CLI tool.
• Only new files that are added to the gallery will be detected.
• Deleted and moved files will not be detected.

Memory feature​

This is considered a fun feature that the team and I wanted to build for so long, but we had to put it off because of the refactoring of the code base. The code base is now in a good enough form to circle back and add more exciting features.

This memory feature is very much similar to GPhotos' implementation of “x years since…”. We are aiming to add more categories of memories in the future, such as “Spotlight of the day” or “Day of the Week highlights”

This feature is now available on the web and will be ported to the mobile app in the near future.

Support XMP Sidecar​

Immich can now import/upload XMP sidecars from the CLI and use the information as the metadata of assets.

Support more raw formats.​

With the recent updates on the dependencies of Immich, we are now extending and hardening support for multiple raw formats. So users with DSLR or mirrorless cameras can now upload their original files to Immich and have them displayed in high-quality thumbnails on the web and mobile view.

Justified layout for web timeline and blurred thumbnail hash​

This is an aesthetic improvement in user experience when browsing the timeline. Photos and videos are now displayed correctly with perspective orientation, making the browsing experience more pleasurable.

To further improve the browsing experience, we now added a blur hash to the thumbnail, so the transition is more natural with a dreamy fade in effect, similar to how our brain goes from faded to vivid memory

Hosting machine learning container on a different machine​

With more capabilities Immich is building toward, machine learning will get more powerful and therefore require more resources to run effectively. However, we understand that users might not have the best server resources where they host the Immich instance. Therefore, we changed how machine learning interacts and receives the photos and videos to run through its inference pipeline.

The machine learning container is now a headless system that can run on any machine. As long as your Immich instance can communicate with the system running the machine learning container, it can send the files and receive the required information to make Immich powerful in terms of searching and intelligence. This helps you to utilize a more powerful machine in your home/infrastructure to perform the CPU-intensive tasks while letting Immich only handle the I/O operations for a pleasant and smooth experience.

So, those are the highlights for the team and the community after a busy month. There are a lot more changes and improvements. I encourage you to read some release notes, starting from version v1.57.0 to now.

Thank you, and I am asking for your support for the project. I hope to be a full-time maintainer of Immich one day to dedicate myself to the project as my life works for the community and my family. You can find the support channels below:

• Monthly donation via GitHub Sponsors
• One-time donation via GitHub Sponsors
• Liberapay
• buymeacoffee
• Bitcoin: 1FvEp6P6NM8EZEkpGUFAN2LqJ1gxusNxZX
• Give a project a star - the contributors love gazing at the stars and seeing their creations shining in the sky.

Join our friendly Discord to talk and discuss Immich, tech, or anything

Cheer!

Until next time!

Alex

Some notable features are:

• OAuth integration
• LivePhoto support on iOS
• User config system

LivePhoto iOS Support 🎉​

LivePhoto on iOS is now supported in Immich.

The motion part will now be uploaded and can be played on the mobile app and the web.

OAuth Integration 🎉​

I want to borrow this chance to express my gratitude to @EnricoBilla, who has been the trailblazer for this feature since the beginning days of Immich. His PR has sparked ideas, suggestions, and discussion among the team member on how to integrate this feature successfully into the app. Thank you so much for your work and your time.

OAuth is now integrated into the system. Please follow the guide here to set up your OAuth integration

After setting up the correct environment variables in the .env file, as shown below

OAUTH_ENABLED=true
OAUTH_ISSUER_URL=http://10.1.15.216:9000/application/o/immich-test/
OAUTH_CLIENT_ID=30596v8f78a4b6a97d5985c3076b6b4c4d12ddc33
OAUTH_CLIENT_SECRET=50f1eafdec353b95b1c638db390db4ab67ef035a51212dbec2f56175e2eb272b5d572c099176e6fe116ecf47ffdd544bgdb9e2edc588307ee0339d25eeccd88
OAUTH_BUTTON_TEXT=Login with Authentik

The web will have the option to sign in with OAuth.

The mobile app will check if the server has OAuth enabled before displaying the OAuth sign-in button.

Support​

If you find the project helpful and it helps you in some ways, you can support the project one time or monthly from GitHub Sponsor

It is a great way to let me know that you want me to continue developing and working on this project for years to come.

Details​

For more details, please check out the release note