Love immich, you can make seperate accounts and do quite fine grained access controll and the search feature is da bomb
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2025
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Thats nice but I wish it had E2E encryption.
I don't like that I can see everyone's photos that use my immich server.
Not that I'd look, but I can if I wanted to, and that's why I only use my server for family
I commented elsewhere here, but E2E encryption is just between the server and the end user (ie a VPN)
You're thinking about encryption at rest, on the storage.
Immich would have to setup a whole new design to be able to store all the metadata on a per-user basis... but... you could have multiple Immich instances if you were to host it for your friends, but I think we're drifting into "why bother" now...
Encryption at rest just means the data itself is encrypted when stored on disk and the key is somewhere. It doesn't dictate that the key is not visible to the server.
Encryption in transit refers to an encrypted channel from client to server.
E2E encryption usually refers to encryption from one entity to another where any intermediary servers do not have the ability to decrypt
Source: too many years doing application security at my job
Pretty much using for your family and not for a photo sharing app for everybody is how Immich was built....
If they're sharing it with me, then sure, I'll add it to the folder for that party, holiday, event
Immich would scan it and faces are taken care of and if there's metadata in there, great, if not, dunno if I could be bothered to edit it... maybe date stamp if that was wildly off.
Immich
Another vote for Immich
Highly recommend using Immich and just creating a separate account(s) for your friend(s). You can even set storage quotas for each individual person.
Your friends should know that you can see their photos if you wanted to though.
Same is true if they save stuff at Google etc. who every owns the server can see their media.
Unless it has E2E encryption
Well yes, if you want a decent search function, duplicate detection, etc., then E2E is just not feasible.
Immich developers confirmed they will never implement it, as it breaks too many features of Immich.
Well... E2E is still feasible, that's your VPN for example.
Encryption at rest is where de-dupe, search, etc, can break.
I only store some family photos. I use immich and have assigned an album for that.
Figured I'd ask here as thought self-hosters would care most about looking after their photos.
Couldn't be more wrong in my case. I host immich so I don't have to worry about taking care of my photos. I hate taking care of my photos. I hate organizing them, and almost never go back to look at them anyways. Immich just yeets them onto my NAS and I can use visual search to sometimes find what I'm looking for with nearly zero effort from me.
All of that, to answer your question, I just throw them on Immich and they appear on the timeline in roughly the correct spot. I also will often share a link, asking friends and family to upload to my Immich server.
I just throw them in.
Only sometimes I create subfolders by name of the other person.
I don't care about metadata (probably should, but have yet to find a way that's easy and future-proof)