immich vs ente photos - the photo backup showdown

Summary

so i finally got around to setting up a proper photo backup solution. because apparently keeping everything on google photos with their “unlimited storage” that they can revoke whenever they feel like it isn’t the smartest move. who would’ve thought. anyway, i went down the rabbit hole of self-hosted photo management and landed on two options that kept coming up everywhere: immich and ente photos. figured i’d share my thoughts because why not. the basics immich is the classic self-hosted option. you run it on your own server, it backs up all your photos and videos, and you have complete control. no one else touches your data. simple concept, solid execution. it’s free and open source, though you’ll obviously need to pay for your own server. ente photos is a bit different. it’s got a cloud service with zero-knowledge encryption (which is fancy speak for “even ente can’t see your photos”) but you can also self-host it. so it’s kind of the best of both worlds if you’re indecisive like me. the setup situation immich is honestly pretty straightforward to set up. docker compose, follow the docs, boom. done. not gonna lie though, it wants some resources. we’re talking 4-6 gigabytes of RAM recommended, a couple CPU cores. so if you’re running this on some ancient server you found in a closet, good luck. ente on the other hand? way more chill on resources. like, we’re talking 130-150 megabytes of RAM. almost nothing. this thing is optimized like someone actually cared about efficiency. setting it up is a bit more involved though, especially if you want to self-host. you need to deal with S3 storage and it gets complicated fast on systems like TrueNAS. the AI stuff here’s where it gets interesting. both services have machine learning for face recognition and searching your photos with natural language. which is genuinely useful, i’m not gonna lie. immich does all the AI stuff on your server. this means it can be pretty resource intensive, but hey, your photos aren’t leaving y...