From: Maya Chen <maya@northfield.house>
To: Alex Rivera <alex@rivera.dev>
Subject: Re: Self-hosted photo library migration
Date: Tue, 14 Jul 2026 09:42:18 -0400

Hi Alex,

I finished the first pass moving the family photos off iCloud and into the self-hosted library last night. Immich is running on the mini PC in the utility closet, with the originals stored on the NAS and nightly snapshots going to the external drive.

A few notes:

- Uploads from my phone are working automatically on Wi-Fi.
- Face grouping is surprisingly good, but I disabled public sharing for now.
- The 2009-2013 albums need cleanup because a lot of scanned photos have the wrong dates.
- I still need to test remote access through Tailscale before we invite Mom and Dad.

Can you check whether the backup job is actually verifying checksums after upload? I saw the cron entry, but I couldn't tell from the logs whether it only copies files or also validates them.

> On Mon, Jul 13, 2026 at 8:17 PM Alex Rivera <alex@rivera.dev> wrote:
> Are we keeping Google Photos as a backup for a while, or cutting over completely once Immich is stable?

Let's keep Google Photos read-only for another month. Once we have two clean restore tests, I think we can stop paying for the extra storage.

Maya