Immich

Immich is a self-hosted photo and video management platform running on Jack. It provides automatic phone backup with a native iOS app and a web interface for browsing, organizing, and downloading photos.

Architecture

Immich runs as a native install inside an unprivileged LXC container (CT 106) on Debian 13. The community helper script compiles five custom image processing libraries from source (libjxl, libheif, libraw, ImageMagick, libvips) for broad format support.

Storage is split across two ZFS pools for performance:

• Originals are stored on the hdd-pool (6x 18TB RAIDZ2) — plenty of capacity for a growing photo library
• Thumbnails and transcoded previews are cached on the ssd-pool (3x 4TB NVMe RAIDZ1) — fast random I/O for smooth timeline browsing
• PostgreSQL database lives on the container's rootfs, also on ssd-pool

The upload directory is bind-mounted from the HDD pool and shared with the Samba file server, so photos are directly accessible as files on the network. This is useful for pulling photos into video editing projects or moving them between NAS folders.

Key Details

• Immich v2.5.6 with PostgreSQL 16 and VectorChord 0.5.3
• Machine learning is disabled — no smart search, face detection, or AI tagging. Can be enabled later with a remote ML container on a dedicated GPU host.
• HTTPS access via Caddy reverse proxy at immich.hake.rodeo
• Phone backup via the official Immich iOS app with automatic background upload
• File browsing via Samba share at smb://10.1.10.103/photos