Hello everyone, Alex from Immich here!
On behalf of the team, I’d like to express my heartfelt gratitude for your support in 2024.
Since the first day I posted the video prototype on the self-hosted subreddit, Immich has been on a journey. I still remember the project’s early days and loved seeing those first issues open on GitHub. How exciting it has been to build something useful for so many people. I am grateful for the compassionate community as well as the feedback and criticism we have received this year.
The project’s core idea is to do good things without a hidden agenda or ill motives, to give people a delightful choice to manage their digital media besides the solutions from exploitative big cloud providers. Just last year, we were daydreaming of how wonderful it would be if we could do those things daily as our full-time job. One might have said it is good karma, but Louis Rossman from FUTO found us and extended the invitation for the company to fund the project to let us develop the software full-time. It was a dream come true for all the core contributors to talk about Immich, interact with the users, have fun writing code, and build out the features of Immich every day. We would not be here without your love and support for the project.
Similar to last year, here’s a recap of everything the project accomplished in 2024:
Milestones
- A new logo
- GPU acceleration for machine learning
- Library watching
- Search enhancement with advanced filtering
- Built-in OpenTelemetry metrics
- Read-only albums
- Email notifications
- Microservices container be gone
- Web translation
- Immich-hosted map tiles
- Star rating
- Basic editing on mobile
- Theming on mobile
- Folder view
- Tag support
- Album sync on mobile
- Automatic database backup
- Auto-switching server URL in the mobile app
- Alternative machine learning URL switching
- Supporter Badge / buy.immich.app
- and more
Fun
- Over 30k stars were added to Immich’s sky on GitHub :star: [editor’s note: Jan 16, 23940]
- Going from MIT to AGPLv3 License
- Over 900 awesome people from the community helped make Immich a better software.
- Overcame our first marketing fallout with the choice of wording in the product key purchase introduction
- Immich isn’t even 3 years old yet. Technically, we are still an infant.
- Alex got his 150-day comment streak on Reddit.
- As shy as an infant, the project managed to get a lot more screentime from many YouTubers
- Coming down from 12 breaking changes in 2023 to 8 breaking changes released in 2024
Next Year
- A stable release is our top priority, and we are pushing hard to have it ready by Q1 of 2025.
- After the stable release is out, we have a series of cool features in mind that we want to add to the application, such as (in no particular order)
- Proper SemVer :P
- Workflows/Automation
- Plugin system
- OCR
- Pet Detection
- Federation
- and more
- We want to offer additional mechanisms and services built directly into Immich to help you with your 3-2-1 backup strategy. This will make self-hosting Immich even easier while allowing you to maintain peace of mind when dealing with your most precious memories.
Finally, the team will attend FOSDEM 2025 in Brussels, Belgium, on February 1st and 2nd. If you are around, stop by and say “hi.” We will have a stand there on Sunday (02-02), and we also registered for a lightning talk session. We’re looking forward to seeing some of you there!
As always, if you find the project helpful, you can support us at https://buy.immich.app/
Have a happy holiday! 🎊
Immich Team
It is a donation. You will get a license key and when applied to your instance, it will report you are a supporter in the web interface.
For me it was a means to show some support.
I’m not saying it’s not true, but nowhere on that page is there the word donation. And if it is, the fact that it is described and a license, tied to a server or a user causes a lot of confusion to me, especially when combined with the fact that there is no paywall but that it requires registration.
Why use the term license, server and user? Why not simply say donation and with the option of displaying the support by getting exclusive access to a badge like signal does?
Again, I’m very happy immich is free, it is great software and it deserves support but this is just super confusing to me and the buy.immich.app link does not clarify things nor does that blog post.
Edit: typo
It’s about setting expectations. The wording is chosen because they believe that paying open source developers for their work should be the norm, not the exception. Calling it a donation would not do that justice. Their wording is saying “Here’s the software, we’ll trust you to pay us for it if it brings you value and you can afford it”. It’s an explicit expectation to pay, unless you have good reasons not to, which is also fine but should be the exception. Whereas a donation is very much optional and not the default expectation by nature.
In the end it’s just a semantic difference, it’s just all about making expectations clear even if there is no enforcement around them.
It says on the page that
So this is a purchase which grants you no extra bonus, which is functionally a donation. This is a common practice with software supported by Futo - they offer the software for free, but ask that you pay a good-faith “license fee” for the software anyway to help fund development. I think Louis Rossman has a video about it somewhere, if I remember I’ll link it in an edit when I have time to find it later.
I totally agree with you, the wording could be more clear.
Reading this: we have enabled a way for you to financially support the continued development of Immich, ensuring the software can move forward and will be maintained, by offering a lifetime license of the software
Was enough for me to order a server license (…). I like the software and being a professional developer I totally understand you might need funds to do the job.
So this is just my €0.02 to keep the flow from caffeine to code flowing…