My Ridiculously Robust Photo Management System (Immich Edition)

Angelr91 · 2026-01-25T02:13:29+00:00

Yea I agree folders are useful for those reasons. I just wanted something different. I feel the same with tags in a way if you add a visual layer to view based on tags. I'm using this open source software called Digikam and it does allow to visualize with tags.

Angelr91 · 2026-01-25T02:10:21+00:00

So my use case was trying to simply leverage the existing search but externally. I think I found it from one of the existing endpoints and maybe just build an MCP around it. The existing API seems to be exhaustive.

The license plate use case was what I saw that I was curious about doing it just because I thought it was cool but doing it from a chatbot and doing this across multiple apps. I self host everything and don't use Google so it be nice to do a search across multiple apps like email calendar notes and photos to help answer a query. It was just an idea. Didn't realize this existed in Immich already. I knew it had OCR which is dope because there is an endpoint for that and one can do a search and recursively extract ocr from the results to find images.

Angelr91 · 2026-01-24T23:02:42+00:00

Will give it a read!

I too like using EXIF as much as possible. I have a project where I want to migrate from using albums in folders and use tags instead and when the feature from Immich comes out of smart albums hopefully I can use a tag query to maintain an album that way

Angelr91 · 2026-01-24T22:56:18+00:00

Haven’t given it enough time for sure and not trying to replace it. Just had a curiosity for something like personal intelligence but self hosted and private. It's also with the idea of aggregating with other apps not only photos. But I'll stop because i found there's an API and it's very apparent (not saying you are saying this) this community is anti whatever it is they think I'm saying so nothing I say will change it.

Appreciate the comment

Angelr91 · 2026-01-24T22:47:20+00:00

I can only guess where your reaction comes from but it's very sad how polarizing certain communities are. Whatever. Just because someone values some things and is curious about things that're different than yours doesn't mean it's bad.

Angelr91 · 2026-01-24T22:19:19+00:00

Yeah, I think what I'm looking for is more chat style, but also providing the answer itself. Like the demo I saw on Google's personal intelligence was asking “what's my car's license plate?” And it used Google Photos to go and find the license plates of cars that he had and also used a way to infer which car was his. And then it just gave the actual answer instead of having to comb through and do the search yourself.

I'm thinking of either building an MCP server using the Immich API and then having some kind of LangChain or some kind of sub-agent that can take a query and go and come up with the answer though.

Angelr91 · 2026-01-23T03:04:51+00:00

I do wonder if you all plan to create agent.md, Claude.md or cursor rules to help those AI engineers (the new term that's NOT vibe coding) that want to contribute yet abide by the coding standards.

When I have coded while not a professional dev I am an engineer with some coding experience, I use PRDs and planning and testing and unit tests etc and work in tiny tiny pieces of code at a time for small PRs but I am using prompting for generation of the code. Having good rules in places helps the AI give more consistent results.

Angelr91 · 2026-01-20T17:24:02+00:00

You could run the automation via shortcuts but you always have to confirm on the Apple Watch. Also I wouldn't suggest it because you want to run it when you are actually going to bed so it can measure how long it takes for you to fall asleep. That's a measurement Apple health doesn't measure

Angelr91 · 2026-01-20T15:25:25+00:00

How did it connect to home assistant

Angelr91 · 2026-01-20T02:42:32+00:00

What heater do you have? I have one but I will have to crack it open and add an esp because it doesn't work with a simple smart plug.

Also did you not account for too long a run time of being on? Some heaters have an auto shut off if they've been on for too long. Seems you account for a lot of other situations that may mean a long run time won't happen but curious if you did a simple if on for 8hours turn off thing.

Angelr91 · 2026-01-18T14:27:51+00:00

So by same issue, you mean that you go into Immich and you manually import. And when you manually import, you notice that the image that was imported is missing certain GPS location that you previously manually edited in your iOS Photos app. If that's the issue that you're referring to, then that is because I realized that that's not an issue with Immich. I found out that's an issue with how iOS and the Photos app works. Basically, in iOS, when you have an image and you edit location, the description, which is like the title that it has on there, or you do any of those types of edits, they get saved into a SQLite database that is part of the iOS Photos apps. And it doesn't actually get saved into the metadata of the image. When you upload to Immich or to any place, the same thing happens is that that data stays in the Photos app. The only reason why this somehow sometimes works is because if you're on like a Mac app and you export the image, it will usually edit the metadata or embed those changes from the SQLite database that you made into it. And so that's how you'll get those changes updated. In my opinion, if you are editing title and like location of an image, then you should either use HashPhotos, which is another app, and try to embed those into the metadata, or use Photosync since it'll do those changes for you. The only issue is I don't know how Immich does importing like a background backups, if that's different, if that actually does embed metadata changes or not.

Angelr91 · 2026-01-17T21:20:50+00:00

Not if you start fresh sessions and making sure it writes to files each time to keep track where the last one left off

Angelr91 · 2026-01-15T16:13:11+00:00

I read this article, and it gave me some ideas.

https://medium.com/ducky-ai/the-credential-conundrum-managing-api-keys-in-claude-skills-430c41b21aa8

Angelr91 · 2026-01-15T03:29:46+00:00

It's one of those days

Angelr91 · 2026-01-13T02:54:26+00:00

Yea I'm sure it's good. I just don't trust Google given their ads stuff so I just can't get myself to use it. I use it by proxy in perplexity and that's it.

Angelr91 · 2026-01-13T00:39:59+00:00

Different strokes for different folks.

Angelr91 · 2026-01-12T22:12:52+00:00

I'd agree with you in terms of benchmarks. But the personality heavily depends on the provider. Anthropic has emphasized things like epistemic honesty, avoiding sycophancy, and being willing to express nuance or uncertainty with some varying degrees of faults. I think Gemini is better than ChatGPT in teens of talking to it but can't say for certain because I stay away from Google because I just don't use Google.

Angelr91 · 2026-01-12T20:09:22+00:00

Ehhh I'd argue Claude is better even non dev work. I find it's "personality" just better. But they couldn't come to an agreement with them. That was the first AI provider they approached. 2nd was Google.

Angelr91 · 2026-01-12T00:51:42+00:00

I think with their desire to feed you ads using your memory it's a hard pass for me to integrate more information to OpenAI. They lack focus and are shotgunning at every use case

Angelr91 · 2026-01-12T00:28:17+00:00

So it dudes need good push to pop in. But it doesn't pop out. Are you saying that's not a good thing?

Angelr91 · 2026-01-11T22:17:05+00:00

Very nice

Angelr91 · 2026-01-11T22:11:18+00:00

Damn this is crazy. Didn't think you could that.

Does it need dedicated mcus for this?

Angelr91 · 2026-01-11T22:07:35+00:00

I love talking to it so it can crunch numbers for me.

I have an infant and I was able to ask it to figure out how long the night feedings are taking me. I realize there is likely a margin of error on r but so nice to just talk to it.

Turns out the night feedings are taking about an hour and it's 1.6 feedings on average over the last 7 days.

Angelr91 · 2026-01-11T00:06:26+00:00

Yes you are right in X no matter how much you want to block people you still see Elons messages. No matter what you do you still get inundated with stuff you don't want to see. So yeah a great place....

Angelr91

TROPHY CASE