I've been using immich now for about a month. The final nail in the coffin was my wife's email telling her she was at 99Gh of 100Gb of storage and if she didn't upgrade she would no longer receive incoming email. WTF Google? We run out entire life by our email! Bank accounts, kids sports events, school information and notification, work stuff. The fact that our email storage is tied to Google photos storage and the Google photos app encourages you to not worry about storage is very alarming. Videos of the kids hockey, birthdays, family events all take up space quickly. We have so many photos and videos in Google's cloud that upgrading storage would easily be an additional $100-$150 A MONTH... Yes, really because we have nearly 14 Tb of videos and photos backed up. I am NOT giving Google $150 every month where a 14 Tb external drive is $260 ONE TIME. I have plenty of old computers I can run Linux on and set Immich to run on.
Email storage should not be tied to photo and video storage - Google knows doing so will put you in a compromising position quickly.
I set docker up on my Windows 11 machine and was new to the entire concept of docker (still am and don't fully understand it yet). I found the immich group on Discord and someone there held my hand on getting immich installed. Afterwards I set up a dynamic DNS hosting service with DynDNS that would keep my home IP address known to a domain name I picked - that way the Immich app on our phones would always update and save photos to the home server no matter where in the world we were. (last ame.dyndns.org is what is set in immich for us. My Windows machine has an app from DynDNS that updates this domain with our IPaddress at all times, so if it changes, the server can still be found over the Internet.
I plan on moving this storage installation of Immich to a headless (no monitor) ubuntu Linux installation on an old computer we no longer need in my basement. Working on that now. But having my own 14 Tb drive at home save me $150 a month (or more, because both my wife and I as well as our kids need to back up photos and videos) is nothing short of amazingly awesome.
Everything runs fast and smooth. I can still face id people in the search and can even tell the search to show me all photos with a "dog" or even "dog in a chair" and NONE of those requests or processing ever touches any server belonging to anyone but me.
That 14 Tb drive by the way? I back it up every week to a physically disconnected OFFLINE 2nd duplicate drive... and in the future, a third duplicate offline as well... because hard drives do die, but also because RANSOMWARE.
We are NEVER going back to cloud storage. Pricing changes and potential interference and intrusion by government agencies is ridiculous.
Also even if Immich (or now mother company Futo) ceased to exist tomorrow as a company this software would continue to run just the same as it is right now - which is so smooth and super fast. The software is independent from their company. It does not rely on ANY resources or cloud based features from them.
So in conclusion - F**k you Google.