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How to create a private alternative to Google Photos using Immich, TrueNAS and Cloudflare?
In the age of digital photos and videos, which are growing in number every day, many people are asking themselves: where to store it all safely? Services such as Google Photos are convenient, but they have their limitations - both in terms of space and cost. What's more, not everyone wants to give up control of their private data to external service providers. Therefore, more and more people are looking for self-hosted solutions. One of the more interesting projects in this area is Immich - A modern, open-source alternative to Google Photos.
What is Immich?
Immich is an application that allows you to automatically upload photos and videos from your phone, group them, recognize faces, create thumbnails, and instantly search huge media libraries. It's ideal for individuals and families who want to collect memories in one safe place - with no monthly fees and full control over the data.
Installing Immich on TrueNAS
In this step-by-step video, I show how to install Immich on TrueNAS, a popular platform for building home and business NAS servers. I create the appropriate datasets (backup, data, library, uploads, thumbs, etc.), give them the right permissions and perform the application installation from the Apps interface. With the ability to configure hardware resources, you can tailor Immich's operation to the power of your server - taking into account the CPU, RAM and even the GPU to speed up image processing operations.
Remote access via Cloudflare
To allow remote access to images from anywhere in the world - without exposing the server to attacks from the Internet - I configure a Zero Trust VPN tunnel through Cloudflare. This allows you to use Immich through your domain (e.g. image.mojadomena.pl), without the need for a fixed IP address or SSL certificate configuration.
Impressions of use
After testing on a library of about 60,000 photos and 1,800 videos, I can safely say: it works really well. Immich handled the huge amount of data, correctly recognized duplicates and faces, and functions such as drag&drop of entire folders and photo indexing impressed me. On top of that, the web and mobile interfaces are very friendly and fast.
Summary
If you are looking for a private, reliable and advanced photo storage solution, Immich combined with TrueNAS and Cloudflare is a great choice. Not only do you gain independence and control over your data, but also comfort and functionality comparable to commercial solutions.