Another back and forth between software options this time Immich versus Photopixel. Photopixel was, fine? But not great. So I’ve set up the Docker Compose for Immich and pointed it to 2 external libraries to start digesting. While it is surely pulling everything in it is doing so slowly. Nearly all images are showing “Error loading image” without much explanation. That said, older years are starting to show thumbnails and open fully after about 8-10 hours of processing.
Ideally, this would be set up as a Kubernetes cluster but, not having done that before, that will take some time to learn.
On Photopixel. I wouldn’t dissuade folks from trying it but my issues were:
- Performance. Thumbnails, even on a faster system, seemed to take a while to populate while scrolling. So far Immich shows blurry previews quickly and resolves to a preview much faster.
- UX for downloads. It was a pain to get to a download of an image. You have to go through a couple clicks to just download the file, Immich it’s right at the top.
- UX overall. Not going to be exhaustive here but overall Immich feels like photos stay front and center and menus are thoughtfully off to the side and laid out well in the options rather than being so front and center with Photopixel.
Need to do a proper breakdown but happy with Immich so far, just a little painful with a large library and a fairly “slow” system.
Updated and Retried on Ubuntu 25.04 and a 16 GB RAM Intel N150 2025/11/06