From: Lena Ortiz <lena@ortizhome.net>
To: Mark Feldman <mark.feldman@example.com>
Subject: Re: self-hosted photo library setup
Date: Fri, 10 Jul 2026 20:14:37 -0400

Hi Mark,

I finally moved the family photos off the old external drives and into the
self-hosted library last weekend. I ended up using Immich on the mini PC in
the closet, with the actual photo storage on the NAS over NFS. It took a
little tuning, but the phone backups are working now and face search is much
better than I expected.

The only thing I would still change is the import workflow. I did a dry run
first, then imported by year so I could catch the bad timestamps before they
spread everywhere. There were a lot of WhatsApp images pretending to be from
1970.

Backups are now:

- nightly database dump
- nightly copy of originals to the backup pool
- weekly encrypted offsite sync

If you set yours up, do the database backup from day one. The photos are the
important part, but rebuilding albums and metadata by hand would be miserable.

> Are you still using iCloud Photos as the main library, or did you fully
> switch over?

For now, I left iCloud enabled on my phone as a convenience copy, but Immich
is the source I care about. Once I'm sure the offsite backups have a few good
months of history, I'll probably downgrade the iCloud storage plan.

Lena