Being tethered to USB each time even if you want to copy or view 1 photo will get incredibly annoying.
Immich will also give you lots of useful features like albums, tags, filtering, face detection (local), and supports multiple devices and users (do you have enough USB ports? :p) . These small features will turn more and more useful as your library grows.
You can first keep Immich working in your local network while you figure out tailscale, flexibility is a strong suit here.
What kind of crap server is that? How on earth do I connect to it or set up a connection so I can access it from anywhere?
The nature of self hosting is that you’re doing the things yourself. With a service like Google photos you don’t even think about this stuff because someone else manages and figured the things out already for you.
This is good, lets you see if you are up for it when things don’t work out of the box exactly like you wanted. If it’s too much then I suggest you use a managed service.
Otherwise, then I suggest you begin with checking out tailscale. Tailscale is not exactly a selfhosted service but it’s the easiest path for SECURE remote access I can think of.
But as the other reply said, do you really need remote access? I mean, you can simply do the backups when you are connected to your home network…
It doesn’t get as easier as this (for photo storage backup):
https://docs.immich.app/overview/quick-start/
It has step by step guide, using very simple commands you can just copy and paste for the most part.
Since you are using linux, and you are in the fediverse I do assume you can move your way around setting up Immich with that guide.
I use a very similar setup, and with a custom UI mpv looks even better. Even on mobile I use an app with libmpv backend which plays my NAS media and anything I throw at it. Also, the ability to smoothly scrub video, especially on touchscreens is a very rare treasure among video players but mpv handles it with no struggle…
I guess jellyfin is for those who want a netflix experience with movie posters, descriptions, and lots of QoL
I’ve tried Immich, but found my plain SMB shares already did 80% of what immich could do I wanted. The remaining 20% I could do easily with my favorite photo/video viewers (looping, filtering, tagging, location data).
I also hate how it’s only a web portal for desktop. There’s no native desktop app, and no seamless integration with file browsers, video players, etc.
Maybe I look at it again in a few years
I found that rclone is enough for me. One backup to locally attached external drive with rclone sync. I add --backup-dir to keep older file versions separate, which I clean up with rclone delete based on their age. I also setup remote backup to OneDrive. rclone also takes care of the encryption for this one to protect from any snooping.
holy crap, i forgot i had heard about this 5 or so years ago.
I wish mojang would have left this in the game
A PSA for you is that the original setup for local invidious is not really worth it at this time. You gotta rotate IP to avoid youtube blocking it, you need to use IPv6, and you have to constantly refresh PO tokens. All of this happens with separate programs so it’s clunky and can’t keep up with youtube’s rate of blocking things, unless you setup some kind of frequent cron jobs, but at the cost of bringing the service down frequently which is not worth it.
For my instance I use the companion setup. It takes care of rotating PO token by detecting when it needs to. It’s also way more robust, based on very well maintained youtube.js project.
Another change I made is routing the invidious connections through VPN. That keeps my real IP safe from getting blocked, and I do remember this setup rotates the VPN server when blocked. I’ll share my compose file in a bit, been using it with almost no issue for almost a year.
This be the true selfhosting ! (not mine but first thing that came to mind)