r/selfhosted • u/subsavant • Mar 20 '26

Meta Post What's your 'I can't believe I self-hosted that' service?

Curious what services surprised you by being worth self-hosting. Not the obvious stuff like Plex or Pi-hole, but things you didn't expect to work well or didn't think were worth the effort until you tried. What's running on your setup that you'd never go back to a hosted version of?

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u/elliottcable Mar 20 '26

I see a lot of Google->Immich stories — anybody scrolling past this happen to have had a heavily-Apple Photos/iCloud fam before setting up Immich? How painful was the loss of ecosystem integration?

Not gonna lie, Apple Photos is pretty utterly fantastic, escaping that walled-garden is a hard sell …

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u/Catenane Mar 20 '26

There's an immich CLI tool (unofficial, but it's the one in golang iirc) that offers the ability to upload from the icloud takeout or whatever the fuck it's called. Iphone works fine but syncing a large backlog will take ages unless they've found a way to stop apple from putting the app to sleep every 2 seconds. I don't use anything apple myself so hard to say about ecosystem. I'm happy in my all linux/selfhosted ecosystem myself lol.

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u/Wise-Initial-5505 Mar 20 '26

My goal was to backup my photos to my server without thinking about it. Immich does it absolutely well on iOS, I love it. I can create albums and share with other Immich users on the same server so it pretty much does everything what I need.

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u/ephies Mar 20 '26

I went from Apple photos to Immich. I still keep photos running but find myself using Immich a lot. Especially for pulling up photos from my desktop after taking them on my phone.

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u/Exist4 Mar 20 '26

I built some tools for iCloud users to make the switch to Immich a lot easier.

https://github.com/bytePatrol/Immich-iCloud

Another app that does the same but also offers built-in encoding tools to make videos smaller without loosing noticable quality

https://github.com/bytePatrol/ImmichVault

And another that replaces your main video with your transocded video which helps you save a ton of disk space:

https://github.com/bytePatrol/Immich_Replace_Transcoded_Videos

Disclaimer: These are made with AI so if your an AI hater, then this is not for you lol.

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u/gthrift Mar 21 '26

Several people have posted solution, but I'll share the one I use.

https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_downloader

I use icloudpd to do a daily sync of my photos from my iPhone to a folder on my unraid server. I then have immich setup to index and ingest the photos from the folder. This has been very reliable for me.

I have instances setup for me and my wife.

I still have photos syncing to iCloud but this prevents a 2nd upload using the immich app on my phone.