Chosing the right photo app for my family

So, Immich vs Ente, this is my last piece of the selfhosted puzzle. Please help me make an informed decision:

Immich

on the plus side, it seems to have more features and it has a gazillion integrations with other selfhosted software. Downside: breaking changes are fairly common AFAIK.

Ente

looks like the opposite, more mature, scoped and less integrated.

Am I reading this right? Am I missing something?

Edit: Thanks everyone, I’m going with immich!

    • friend_of_satan@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      19 days ago

      photoprism is good. i ran it for a few years before running both immich and photoprism side by side, and eventually shut down photoprism and moved entirely over to immich. i’d never give anybody flak for using photoprism, but for people starting from scratch i’d strongly recommend immich.

  • Nibodhika@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    20 days ago

    Echoing what others have said, Immich hasn’t had breaking changes in a while. That being said it’s one of the services I keep it on a pinned version and read release notes before updating.

  • litchralee@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    5·
    20 days ago

    Downside: breaking changes are fairly common AFAIK.

    By my extremely cursory reading, this stopped being a problem after the v2.0.0 release, when they adopted semantic versioning. According, breaking changes would only occur when the major version number is rolled. And version v3.0.0 was just released 5 days ago, whereas v2.0.0 was released in October 2025.

    It may be down to taste, but I view 9 months as being acceptable, given the breadth of features offered and the folks willing to put effort into the project.

    • warmaster@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      20 days ago

      Yeah, not too bad, but not exactly great either. Do they backport fixes? Do they maintain something like an LTS release?

      • litchralee@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        4·
        20 days ago

        Is that something you’re looking for? As a practical matter, the effort to maintain multiple release branches and backports – compared to the norm of just maintaining a single main branch – is an outsized effort, available to only well-funded FOSS projects, usually by having an industry sponsor that makes it a priority.

        I posit that the grand majority of selfhosted FOSS software, by project count, do not have back ported branches. And so production environments will want to set up an offline validation setup to evaluate update, prior to making the switch. Not convenient, sure, but not exactly insurmountable either.

        At some point, some amount of responsibility for use of FOSS software must fall upon the users, or else the project is less about creating value by building up the commons for software, and more on the exploitation/abuse of the volunteers.

  • tiz@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    19 days ago

    I’ve tried both and had favored Ente for months but I eventually drifted towards Immich. The most obvious reason is that Ente isn’t optimal for self hosting. And it’s rather proof of concept to show they are committed to openness. On the other hand, Immich is built for self hosters.

    Ente has client side encryption. That why I initially committed in order to respect privacy of my users. So if you care about the users. Go for it.

  • BingBong@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    31·
    20 days ago

    There is also photoprism although its become less popular than immich over the last year or two. What are your requirements? That would help folks give you good recommendations.

    • warmaster@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      20 days ago

      I faintly remember they had some paywalled features or something like that. Is that true?

      • BingBong@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        20 days ago

        Some of the GUI functions for user management are paywalled. Its nothing I’ve found to be problematic in my use case.

  • AbidanYre@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    20 days ago

    I’ve been pretty happy with ente after moving from immich a year or two ago when the breaking changes were basically every time I opened the app on my phone.

  • groet@feddit.orgEnglish
    2·
    20 days ago

    My experience with ente was that it is horribly slow. It also lacks any feature to upload a large number of photos at once. I just never bothered uploading my 10k pictures I have taken over the last 15 years because it would have had to transfer them to a phone and then have the app open for a few weeks. No rclone or any other reasonable way to upload from a computer other than browser (which just doesn’t work for more than a few images)