Some weeks ago I discovered Immich and was immediately hooked and started feeding the family photo collection into it.

Immich on CIFS

It’s running on a VM at Hetzner, and I immediately filled up the disk with too much data. Looking around, I discovered that Hetzner offers “storage boxes” at the fraction of the cost of a VM with the same disk space, so I launched a 1 TB instance there.

The Immich instance is rooted at /cb/immich/library/. In that directory, Immich confusingly creates another “library” directory, which holds the actual pictures, plus some more subdirectories.

There is now a cifs mount inside the outer library dir:

//u000000-sub1.your-storagebox.de/u000000-sub1 on /cb/immich/library/cifs type cifs

And a bunch of symlinks redirect some of the Immich directories to the remote server:

$ ls -l /cb/immich/library/
insgesamt 12
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 25. Mär 02:00 backups/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root    0  2. Apr 18:18 cifs/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root   18 24. Mär 19:28 encoded-video -> cifs/encoded-video/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root   12 24. Mär 19:28 library -> cifs/library/
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 23. Mär 13:05 profile/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root   11  2. Apr 20:37 thumbs -> cifs/thumbs/
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 25. Mär 21:54 upload/

Initially I had planned to keep the “thumbs” directory on the local disk for performance, but it outgrew the local disk pretty fast as well. (Perhaps I should move the remaining two over as well…)

It’s not the fastest setup, but it works and the storage space costs are very much ok.

Immich on PostgreSQL

I already have a PostgreSQL instance running, so I didn’t want Immich to create another one. The official documentation mentions this is possible, but doesn’t detail out the instructions. Here’s what I did:

1. In docker-compose.yml, removed the entire database: section.

2. In .env, use these database settings:

DB_PASSWORD=xxxxxxxxxxxx
DB_URL='postgresql://immich:xxxxxxxxxxxx@172.17.0.1/immich'
DB_DATABASE_NAME=immich

(Possibly DB_URL is enough, but the other two don’t hurt.)

3. One complication was that the PostgreSQL running outside of Docker needs to be reachable by Immich inside Docker, so I told it to use the Docker network address 172.17.0.1. PostgreSQL was already set to listen_addresses='*', and I just had to add a ufw firewall rule:

sudo ufw allow proto tcp from 172.17.0.0/16 to 0.0.0.0/0 port 5432

And a pg_hba.conf entry:

host    all             all             172.18.0.0/16           scram-sha-256

• Notes