Comment by dgxyz

That's cool, but when a friend died last summer, Immich allowed me to find all the digital photos I had of him, even out of focus in the background. I get many requests from friends for old pictures, "do you remember that night when we all did a group photo, etc etc?" and the search facility in Immich allowed me to in a minute what sometimes took years to find, when scouring folders in spare time.

For me, there's nothing like being able to search for "brown dog" and get all the photos of my dog back. Not to mention all the other things Immich has that make managing a library pleasant.

I not only urge you to try it, but to buy the "supporter" pack, Immich really deserves it.

Same here, although one thing that's difficult with this is things like finding "that one photo we took 5 years ago which grandma used as a phone background". So now I gotta find the right external hard drive to plug in and fortunately the folders are by date but still it's a drag. So I'm considering looking into immich if it can just function as a server that shows thumbnails on some terabytes of date-sorted photos and videoes, no need for the machine learning stuff. Though I feel like there must be a less "heavy" solution than immich for this.

There is no need to replace it, certain changes can be additive. Immich falls into that category - you can still just see/use them as ordinary files. It just makes finding/viewing/sharing/processing them easier on top.

You can keep your file current structure/workflow and just use immich as a viewer and search engine, read only.

I'm like you, and a big fan of Pigallery2 precisely for its simplicity. But it turns out that Immich does support external libraries, so you can keep your manual file management in your filesystem and still use Immich for efficient indexing, face recognition, quick picture retrieval by year, location, people etc...

I'd recommend you try Immich (there's a docker compose version) and if you don't like it, you can just remove it and move on.

Immich stores images in a configurable folder structure. That you can _change_ at any moment, and Immich will happily rearrange the files accordingly.

Mine is something like "Album_Name/YEAR/MONTH/day-hour-minute-sec.jpg".

> After going through 25 years of changing software every few years on this front I can’t be bothered. Files on disk. Nothing over the top. Immich is just another thing to maintain. Another problem which will result in a wholesale migration down the line.

I've got the solution to this. I'm like you: files on disk. But I also use Immich: and here's the kicker... I pass the drive/volume with my photos to Immich as read-only (I use containers so it's easy: the drive itself is read-write, but Immich only has read-only access to it).

When I'm pissed off by Immich or something better comes along, I destroy the Immich containers and it's gone.

And I still my files on disk (with checksums as part of the filenames, moreover, seen that family JPG pictures aren't files that happen to change a lot and if they change, they can be renamed).