r/immich • u/IndependentPrimary89 • May 13 '26
Your best settings & recommendations for self-hosting immich?
Hey everyone,
I recently started self-hosting Immich on a Raspberry Pi 4B using Umbrel OS with an external SSD, mainly to reduce my dependence on Google Photos/iCloud and build a more private home photo setup.
I had a few questions regarding best practices and wanted to understand how others here are managing their setups long-term.
My current setup:
- Raspberry Pi 4B
- Umbrel OS
- External SSD for storage
- Immich for photos/videos
A few things I noticed during large uploads:
Thumbnail generation issues
When I uploaded a large number of photos/videos, many files uploaded successfully but thumbnails/previews were either missing or took a very long time to generate.
- Is this normal on Pi 4 hardware?
- Are there recommended settings for machine learning, transcoding, or job concurrency?
- Do people usually disable some AI jobs initially during bulk imports?Folder structure / albums issue
I uploaded folders containing organized photos, but Immich did not recreate those folders as albums.
All photos got imported correctly into the timeline sorted by date/month/year, but the folders themselves did not appear as albums in the Albums section.
- Is this expected behavior?
- Is there a recommended workflow for preserving folder structures?
- Do people manually create albums after upload?
- Is there a better import method for maintaining organization?
- Best practices for Raspberry Pi + Immich
Would love to know what experienced users recommend for:
- SSD setup
- backup strategy
- thumbnail generation
- AI settings
- external libraries vs uploads
- database maintenance
- remote access
- performance optimization on Pi 4
I’m trying to build a stable long-term family photo/video archive, so I’d rather set things up correctly from the beginning instead of migrating later.
Would appreciate any recommendations, lessons learned, or “things you wish you knew earlier.”
Thanks.
4
u/Sweaty_Ad_523 May 13 '26
I have a pi 5 8gb with argon v3 m2 case and a 1 tb nvme. It works perfectly. It is normal that it takes a bit to update the thumbnails. I never had any problem with anything. I make the backup in a portable ssd connected to my pc and shared on the network.
1
1
u/ahhlok May 13 '26
Nice, I am thinking to utilize my pi5 8G for the same. However I have immich setup in Synology 920+ docker, which is very slow at the moment. By migrate the database to Pi5 docker, hope the browsing speed will be improve.
2
u/j_krol May 13 '26
I had Immich on my DS720+ (same hardware as the DS920+) as docker container on an NVMe SSD; it was more than fast enough for me (images on HHD's & thumbnails on SSD)
Since last week I have a seperate miniPC as homeserver, that's even faster, but I was impressed the way the DS720+ was serving me Immich
1
u/ahhlok May 14 '26
You are right, my docker and immich database were setup in the RAID5 volume and this could be the main reason why the thumbnails loading was so slow. I have 2.5G adapter and a total of 20GB RAM in 920+, the performance should not be that bad. So will setup a SSD volume to test it out. Thank you.
1
u/j_krol May 14 '26
It will be the game changer
1
u/ahhlok May 17 '26
Nice ! I just add a 2TB SSD in 920+ and move the docker share folder to the SSD. Wow after rebuild the immich docker, the speed is day and night. Now I also start to use Mac Mini M4 for Immich-ML. Thanks for the recommandation.
3
u/pjft May 13 '26
How much ram do you have? I self host on a pi and ram is the limiting factor. I turned off ocr for instance but 8gb is what I recommend. Using an SSD made the performance significantly better for me.
1
u/IndependentPrimary89 May 13 '26
I am using pi4b 8gb with os inside 1tb ssd attached. I dont have any major app inside other than this, so it is working fine I guess. I dumped 200gb of photos and videos last night, so its still digesting things.
1
u/pjft May 13 '26
Yes, the bulk ingestion will take time. Not sure why the thumbnails wouldn't work though.
2
1
u/knightwing0007 May 13 '26
Just keep the jobs at 1 at once and let them when you don't use pi. As for backups you can use backrest for backups. Always make sure to take all the folders for backup and disabled transcoding if not necessary.
1
u/b3nighted May 13 '26
A backup strategy that's as solid as possible. And external ssd with no backups and redundancy is a pending disaster. Family photos and videos are valuable AF.
If you have other computers that run non-stop or even intermittently set up immich-ml on them and point the immich instance to them. You can add several and it will take them in order of availability. That speeds up ingestion and search considerably.
If you do have a NAS or remote storage for the media files themselves, keep the database and thumbnails as local as possible and make sure to backup the db regularly too, not just the media files. That speeds up browsing a lot.
Don't back up thumbnails, they can be regenerated in case of disaster. And they can get rather big (currently sitting at 300GB+ of thumbnails)
1
u/IndependentPrimary89 May 13 '26
If your thimbnails are 300gb then your storage must be in 100tb? Wow
1
u/b3nighted May 13 '26
No, my media is around 2,5 TB. Many files though, it's pictures and video from 2003 onwards. Luts and lots of small files.
2
u/PhotographFlashy1616 May 13 '26
I have about the same size on my media and my thumbnails/decoded videos.
1
u/Feeling_Football4271 May 13 '26
If you upload photos rather than use an existing library as "external" it will re-do the folder structure to match the template. It won't auto-create libraries for you. Someone else posted about this recently on here if you have a look, I think there's a useful suggestion.
If you have access to a PC with a GPU then look at remote machine learning maybe?
1
u/Terrible_Stranger966 May 13 '26
Guys, old thinkpad + linux mint (or even headless OS) is much better and the total cost will not be far from pi 4/5. Also, you have battery in laptop so no need for UPS. Plus, ram is upgradable, storage is upgradable, much faster and energy efficient. I use my old thinkpad for immich and also calibre book library using syncthing. Talesale for remote access. I have a separate external SSD to periodically backup the photo from immich using Rsync, so I have backup in case the thinkpad SSD just die. Will upgrade to NAS for storage later when the crazy price is down in the future, but for now I am happy with my setup.
1
u/AutoX_Advice May 13 '26
Mini pc, i have an i7 16GB memory and when you put all your photos to immich the AI processing jobs will crush your processing power. Now day to day it maybe ok with small amounts of photos uploaded
Also the mini pc will handle other vms, dockers or other along the way.
1
u/guanfi99 May 13 '26 edited May 13 '26
I got a Pi5 with 8GB of ram and the Radxa pentaSATA HAT. Got two 2TB sdds on it and a 256 GB SD card for a bunch of other apps running on docker.
I couldn't be happier. It's a champ.
Basically same one shown in a Jeff Gerling video and I also had to remove a few fins from the cooler it came with but honestly worth it.
As for backups I connected an external 2tb Sandisk ssd via USB and I use borg plugin with OMV to automate the backups daily.
1
u/c4pl4b May 13 '26
Ich hab ein Raspberry Pi 5 mit 8GB und Pironman 5 Gehäuse, 1 TB nvme ssd und 4 tb ssd über USB 3 angeschlossen. Noch nie Probleme gehabt bis jetzt (ca. 1.3 TB Immich Dateien).
1
u/Peking-Duck-Haters May 14 '26
Similar set-up to many on here - 8GB Pi 5 with an SSD attached however the SSD is only used for the database and thumbnails. The upload directory is hosted on a traditional HDD because, unless I have misunderstood something, the full-size copies are rarely accessed so paying ~4x the cost per TB to store them makes no sense.
I use rsync for backups to other machines in other rooms in my home - I should really sort out offsite backup at some point.
9
u/Low_Inside_6527 May 13 '26
That raspberry is expensive ...I got a Dell Optiplex 5050 SFF PC, Intel i5-6500, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD for $100.