Photoprism users every time this topic comes up
this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2026
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I switched from photo prism after 12 months on it, to immich. Much prefer it and offers more and better features from my perspective.
Yeah I might switch over too because immich didn't originally have some of the sort and detection features like Photoprism.
Photoprism is pretty good but it doesn't have some of the nicer UI features immich has.
Also, accounts. Long promised for community or lowest tier then integrated only in the expensive tier of photoprism IIRC, which made me switch because that only then works for individuals.
LOL 😂
photoprism is good. i ran it for a few years before running both immich and photoprism side by side, and eventually shut down photoprism and moved entirely over to immich. i'd never give anybody flak for using photoprism, but for people starting from scratch i'd strongly recommend immich.
Downside: breaking changes are fairly common AFAIK.
Breaking changes only come with major version changes now.
Using immich for like 4 years and it never broke down. Migration steps are always super clear.
Ente i got for my parents as an alternative to iCloud photos and until I figure out some tunneling.
Netbird on a cheap $50 a year vps.
I use Ente, but it’s purely because I want my images backed up in the cloud, but I don’t want the server provider to be able to mess around with them. Hence the e2ee being important to me.
I love Ente, I think it’s a great project, but for self-hosting, immich seems like the best choice to me.
Just a FYI, when using a tool like rclone to backup data to some cloud, it can also encrypt the files for you when pushing data, and decrypt when pulling data. Of course, the files will still be unencrypted at rest.
That's very neat! It doesn't really work for my Ente use-case, but definitely good to know!
It wasn't rsync that started breaking because of some Claude changes, right?
Kind of. Claude helped the developer find lots of bugs. He decided to start making major changes to fix these bugs. Major changes often break things.
I think it was rsync indeed. Afaik rclone and rsync are different developers, despite the name
rsync and rclone are two different projects
Echoing what others have said, Immich hasn't had breaking changes in a while. That being said it's one of the services I keep it on a pinned version and read release notes before updating.
Running immich since 2 years, never had a single breaking issue or instability of any kind.
There is really no reason not to choose immich unless you prefer something that's only in ente.
Immich is just fantastic. Probably one of the best software in the self-hosting world. I had no problems with breaking changes in the last ~1,5 years I'm using it.
Right now, the latest update doesn't run in my otherwise until now perfectly working environment. It's frustrating because there's no easy way to downgrade it in my setup.
Don't forget to change the database. There were breaking changes there as they moved to a different version in 3.0 which causes error loops.
All of my stuff luckily moved seamlessly without having to restore a backup.
Yeah, it's going the be a whole ordeal. I will have to block an afternoon for the migration. Definitely not a "never breaks anymore" scenario. Everything can be broken, there's no perfectly stable software.
Can't comment on ente. I looked at it originally along with many others and initially chose photo prism. Ran that for around 6 months then switched to immich. Have no plans on changing any time soon. I host 4 users on it. It works great, been using it over 12 months so been on it from v1, and been through all the changes to V2 and V3 and never had a breaking change. Have auto updates in in podman for it so I never manually touch it. It just works.
My experience with ente was that it is horribly slow. It also lacks any feature to upload a large number of photos at once. I just never bothered uploading my 10k pictures I have taken over the last 15 years because it would have had to transfer them to a phone and then have the app open for a few weeks. No rclone or any other reasonable way to upload from a computer other than browser (which just doesn't work for more than a few images)
@warmaster — Immich’s integration sprawl is its strength but also the achilles heel I hit last month when a breaking change borked our 3-day-old sync pipeline. Ente’s scoped approach felt like a breath of air after that; we ended up rolling our own lightweight version in Go just to avoid the churn. Immich’s selfhosted Discord is great for edge cases, but if your family doesn’t need Jellyfin thumbnails or Grafana dashboards, Ente’s simplicity might save you the scripting overhead. I wrapped the trade-offs here https://cxgo.ai/l/pti2J6s in case it’s useful — just a messy markdown file from my notes.
I wrapped the trade-offs here https://cxgo.ai/l/pti2J6s
The link goes to some wall of articles, none of them obviously about immich. Is there a better link?
I just moved from v2 immich to v3.
Literally changed the version in my env file and then deleted all docker images.
I then pulled all images and brought all containers online.
0 issues.
Immich has been running really well for us on my n100 for 10 months now. I did dual Google photos and immich for a 3 months and then exported out from gphotos.
I started 2026 with immich only. Been rock solid the entire time.
Of course that's all anecdotal and ymmv. But immich is fantastic
I'm running Immich as a TrueNAS app. Unfortunately after upgrading to v3 the immich container is stuck on starting, without outputting any logs. Haven't had the time to debug yet though.
Well the whole system just went down. So most likely not am Immich issue, but a weak ass server issue.
Good luck getting that sorted!
You might need to changw the PostgreSQL Version if you are still on an oder one. Roll back to 2.x, make sure it runs, edit the App to use the new PG, Start, Update to 3.0
Yea I changed over to v3 without issue recently too, I read the release notes and some of the issue conversations on github, so I knew what to expect.
That's something a lot of people dont do, if you are self hosting an open source project it's on you to stay on top of those things, stay updated as much as possible but dont do major jumps blindly without backups.
In my case, I went from a regular immich in a container to one with openVino built in for gpu accelerated image analysis and face detection, and I had to change my database container image. Then it fired straight up and everything seems to work 100% so far.
You know.. it's hilarious you say that about staying on top of your selfhosted stuff.
I learned that lesson not too long ago.. I am self-hosting ubiquitys unifi network application.
Apparently two years ago they split out the database from the app.
I had no idea until my wifi abruptly stopped working. Haha
Now I pay attention to that stuff a little more.
Lmao
yea, very easy to fall back into the bad habit of blindly updating without giving the release notes a skim.
Pretty much the exact same experience here. I just removed my wife's photo storage from Google completely as of this month 🎉. Don't even need the security blanket anymore. Immich is it.
I had a mini panic when moving from v2 to v3 was not automatic today, but it was a 15 minute fix, that was mostly just reading the step-by-step instructions for the update. Copy-pasted a handful of lines and we're off!
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Immich
Downside: breaking changes are fairly common AFAIK
Uh... that's news to me. I've been hosting 2 user's photos for 1.5 years with absolutely zero breaking changes. I just updating from v2 to v3 and nothing broke.
I briefly checked out Ente, but personally I have zero trust for any project that requires users to sign a CLA to contribute like Ente: https://github.com/ente/ente/pull/11084#issuecomment-4762402896
Immich doesn't do those shenanigans: https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/7023#discussioncomment-8433346
CLAs are bad because the project can change the license whenever they feel like it. So Ente is effectively reserving the right to go full evil with their CLA.
Whereas Immich can't suddenly decide they want to move away from AGPLv3.
Ok, wow. Well, that kinda wraps it up for me. Fuck CLAs.
immich hasnt had any major breaking changes for a while in my experience using it for a few years, anything that does break is probably some third party integration or plugin that would have to wait for it's own maintainer to fix, that's pretty normal in the open source world.
Except for database versions in 2.7.5->3.0.0
But one docker compose change and it migrated seamlessly.
Immich released it's first "stable" version. They mean to have fewer breaking changes and prioritize compatibility.
https://immich.app/blog/v2.0.0-release
I highly recommend.
They actually just released v3 https://immich.app/blog/v3.0.0-release
acruakly
Brand new typo 😂
Fixed 😅😅
😆👍🙏
Downside: breaking changes are fairly common AFAIK.
This is no longer the case after the version 2.0 release. Version 2.0 is the stable release: https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/22546
Funny enough I had to rollback, since it doesn't start in the latest version in my setup. I have to make a conscious effort to keep it one or two subversions behind. It is not the first time an upgrade breaks my install. It will probably be a whole thing when I decide to actually upgrade it again.
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Downside: breaking changes are fairly common AFAIK.
By my extremely cursory reading, this stopped being a problem after the v2.0.0 release, when they adopted semantic versioning. According, breaking changes would only occur when the major version number is rolled. And version v3.0.0 was just released 5 days ago, whereas v2.0.0 was released in October 2025.
It may be down to taste, but I view 9 months as being acceptable, given the breadth of features offered and the folks willing to put effort into the project.
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