Moving out of Immich - avoiding lock-in
I've decided to leave Immich. I self host my own server, and after 1.5 years of dealing with Immich giving me headaches with the self-hosting piece, I'm going to stop using it specifically. I realized I was trying to talk myself into liking it and using it just to save money, but I have not liked Immich for a long time, and that feeling has compounded over time. I think it works well for others, but not me, so I'm vamoosing. And I'm realizing...Immich has a proprietary file storage format (POSTGRES database) just like larger services.
There's a lot of info out there on moving to Immich, but not a lot on moving out of it...maybe because it's too much of a pain/nightmare to do so, as I'm discovering, since you lose all of your albums when you leave given they have a proprietary POSTGRES database where they store all of that information. I rely heavily on albums so I'm a bit cooked at this phase.
Fortunately I found a site that actually talks about how to future proof your photos in Immich and I think this is a good approach to apply in the future, as well, no matter what service you're using, so thought I would share it.
The TL;DR is use a common storage template so that the files are organized in a way that makes sense on export vs odd groupings, and use tags instead of albums so it's in a common file format no matter what service you use.
The suggestions he makes are bang-on, and you can bulk-tag your albums, so that will be an easy process. I highly recommend this as a full read since it's well worth it. Andrew Marder's "Immich Portability".
I'll be doing a comparison of two services I think I've narrowed down to and making a choice for which I'll use. Currently it's between Jottacloud and Ente. I liked them both when I've tested in the past so we'll see how I feel this go-round as there have been lots of updates since my last testing in spring 2025. I'm leaning toward Jotta for a few reasons, including that it can replace my use of Filen.io for my cloud backups overall in addition to replacing my photo cloud service.