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Photo Management Recommendations

Here’s how I manage my photos as of September 2025.

Backup and collection: Immich

I self-host Immich via YunoHost, in combination with the Android app, to collect mobile phone pictures in one place automatically. I also like that Immich does some basic things to make general photo browsing more pleasant: automatic grouping by time, face recognition, deduplication, and probably more I’m not aware of.

Self-hosting is a bit of a pain but I’m getting used to it. YunoHost does a lot to make it easier. My server randomly crashes sometimes, but I’m sure I’ll resolve that at some point.

The biggest downsides of Immich are that

1. you have to keep the app version and server version in sync, which is painful if there are people other than yourself using it, and
2. therefore you have to update the app by downloading the latest APK, which I’m okay with but is annoying to have to explain to other users of the server. Both F-Droid and Google Play are always a bit outdated.
3. Also, the YunoHost distribution of Immich does not support SSO yet.

Otherwise I’m terribly happy with Immich. It’s a neat piece of software.

Immich and Whatsapp/Signal

To make sure the avalanche of media that barges into my Android phone on a daily basis via Signal and WhatsApp doesn’t foul my nice and pristince Immich image collection, I use the following setup, suggested to me by Daniel Cox:

• Set Immich automatic backup to backup the Pictures/$app folder (with $\texttt{\$app} \in \{ \texttt{Whatsapp}, \texttt{Signal} \}$).
• Whenever I get sent a picture that is worth keeping, press “Save” after viewing the picture in $app. This makes $app export the picture to the Pictures/$app folder. Immich then detects the new picture and uploads it to the server.

If Pictures/$app does not exist yet for you, export a picture and the messaging apps will create it. The same goes for the Movies folder.

Large-scale editing and sorting: Digikam

Whenever I have a large collection of photos I need to go through and sort, tag, or change multiple kinds of metadata (which, admittedly, is extremely rare), I use Digikam. It’s a great piece of software. If you take an hour or so to get used to it, as far as I can tell, you can get it to do anything you will ever need. The only downside is that it requires a special folder on disk, and is a bit slow to start.

To run Digikam, I have an AppImage binary somewhere in my home folder to make sure I run the latest one. This makes a big difference if you use face recognition.

Small-scale editing and sorting: Geeqie and mapivi

For quick-and-dirty editing and sorting, I use a combination of Geeqie and mapivi. Geeqie is nice for just scrolling through pictures, deleting any I don’t like, and eyeballing the metadata to see if everything I need is there (in practice, just a sensible date). For the odd picture that’s missing metadata, I use mapivi. Both are provided by Linux Mint/Debian repositories. I think their versions are quite outdated but they do enough for my usecase so this is perfect.

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