I've decided to take control of my digital data and I didn't want to have all my photos under Google's control, or any other company. Even if Google probably already trained some AI with all our photos, it's never too late.

This level of privacy was never a high priority for me, and I valued the features that Google Photos provided - searching pictures in a map view, face recognition, smart search, creating shared albums with family and colleagues are some of the features I used a lot.

Lately, however, I've started getting more conscious and concerned about how our digital life is used by companies and started questioning who actually owns the data. With that in mind, I started researching some open-source and self-hosted solution to replace Google Photos and was surprised to see how much the open-source projects have evolved in the past years. I was delighted to find Immich and see that it already has all functionalities that I loved in Google Photos.

I wasn't ready to spend a lot of money on a commercial NAS or a home-server for hosting the service, so I decided to get a Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB RAM) and the Radxa Penta SATA HAT.

For now I've installed 3x1TB SSDs. I kept 1 of those SSDs for applications in general (more about it later) and the other two in RAID1 (mirror) configuration. Keeping the data duplicated gives me some peace of mind in case any of those SSDs fail. I'm also considering making frequent backups and saving it into a cold storage solution online, as I'm trying to follow the Backup Article

I've uploaded all my photos, including older pictures from more than 10 years ago that were not in google photos, to my Immich instance and I was very happy with the result. The application looks and feels like Google Photos; The Raspberry handles it very well, even with other applications running.

Not only did Immich meet my feature expectations, but it also offered a cost-effective solution for storing my digital memories. Google Drive charges €99.99 per year for 1 TB of storage. I paid €89.63 for each 1TB SSD (WD Red). In one year I would have covered the storage price. You would also need to consider the reliability that storing photos in Google Drive provides - You don't need to worry about a hard drive failing and having to replace it. Having 2x1TB for redundancy would pay off in less than 2 years. However, I'm not even considering privacy and other aspects that are harder to put a price tag on it.

The mobile app (Android and iOS) are also quite good and I have nothing to complain so far. it is still a bit behind in some functionalities, but those are not a blocker for me. The tags functionality, for example, are only available in the web version. The most important functionality in my opinion, is the ability to automatically backup all my photos to my server.

Backing up your photos to your server is fairly simple if you want to keep it the server running closed in your network, without access to the internet. However, I wanted to go the extra mile and make it accessible remotely, setting up a custom domain, port forwarding and a dynamic DNS Client. Since I already had my own domain, setting up the rest wasn't too complicated with the help of ChatGPT.

There are, of course, other nerdier benefits. An interesting aspect I discovered is that I can offload the machine learning processes to another machine. For example, in my case, I've pointed it to my desktop pc running a 4080 SUPER, making the heavier processes much faster (Smart Search, Face Detection, Facial Recognition, Video Transcoding).

At the end, this was a very fun project that aligns with my values. By taking control of my data, I can ensure that these precious moments remain accessible and meaningful for years to come, without being exploited by companies or deriving other benefits from what should remain entirely mine.

I want my digital memories to be stored for a very long time and to be able to share those with my kids, grandkids and hopefully great grandkids. There is something special about telling stories and showing those photos and videos. It's also very interesting that a single picture unblocks memories, not only the small instant where the picture was taken, but from several hours and even days around the day the picture was taken. In one second you are looking at a picture, and the other you are remembering everything else you did that day, the people you met and the places you've been.

I would encourage everyone to take control and take care of your precious digital memories.