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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
Pretty much the exact same experience here. I just removed my wife's photo storage from Google completely as of this month π. 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!
Good to know. it's very tempting. It has every feature we need, and it integrates to every other relevant app I selfhost.
Do you keep a backup? How do you do it?
Immich is great. I run a small friends and family instance on a NAS and Iβve never had a hiccup that took more than ten minutes to fix. My backup system is borg to a Hetzner storage box nightly with a healthchecks.io check set to email me if it goes more than 48 hours without a success. Cheap, reliable, and fast enough for me.
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.
Photoprism users every time this topic comes up
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.
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.
LOL π
Iβve tried both and had favored Ente for months but I eventually drifted towards Immich. The most obvious reason is that Ente isnβt optimal for self hosting. And itβs rather proof of concept to show they are committed to openness. On the other hand, Immich is built for self hosters.
Ente has client side encryption. That why I initially committed in order to respect privacy of my users. So if you care about the users. Go for it.
Downside: breaking changes are fairly common AFAIK.
Breaking changes only come with major version changes now.
I do still read the changelogs and compare compose files thoroughly on every major update. With that in place, Immich has not once broken down on me, and I've been here from almost the very start.
Oh, same here. As soon as I discovered Immich, I pored through all the info I could get my hands on and found that breaking changes happened often, so I made absolutely certain to read every changelog for things that may affect my setup. I sstopped updating it last year due to life getting in the way, and it was stuck on 1.138 (and shut off) until last week when I decided to pay attention to it again.
I've got a second deployment of immich that also got stuck somewhere on v1.x. May I ask how you upgraded to the most recent version? Did you just go for 3.0, or did you do "baby steps" in between? (e.g. 1.138 > 2.0 > 3.0)
Did you just go for 3.0, or did you do βbaby stepsβ in between? (e.g. 1.138 > 2.0 > 3.0)
Pretty much that. Downloaded the latest compose.yml, copied all the relevant bits from my existing compose file to the fresh one (volumes, database/db credentials, etc), set the version to v2.0.0, and let 'er rip. Made sure it was playing nice, then checked all the changelogs up to 2.7.x (whatever the newest release was last week), set the version to v2, and updated it again. That was the newest release. Fast forward to this week, all I did was set the version to 'v3' and the update took without a problem.
Great, I'll probably do just that this summer. Thanks for the info!
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.
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.
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.
I use Ente, but itβs purely because I want my images backed up in the cloud, but I donβt want the server provider to be able to mess around with them. Hence the e2ee being important to me.
I love Ente, I think itβs 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
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
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.
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.
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.
The big difference is that ente is encrypted.
If you use FDE, Immich is also encrypted but only at rest.
Ente is a pain to setup, was never meant to be selfhostable correctly
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.
I've been pretty happy with ente after moving from immich a year or two ago when the breaking changes were basically every time I opened the app on my phone.
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)