Today I managed to set up a #copyparty instance as a frontend for a remote sftp mount, reverse proxied with #nginx for TLS encryption, on  #NixOS. Oh boy was that a wild ride. 😮‍💨

Copyparty itself is funny and you need a bit to understand its config style. It needs a whole lot of proxy config to make it work well (see its repo). The wildest part was actually mounting that dang sftp share. Ended up using #rclone, but man are systemd.mounts, FUSE and allow_other weird beasts 🤪

Immich got really good just in the last little while. Some random geek notes/thoughts, after several hours tinkering (non-geeks, stop reading here):

As to sizing: a Pi 5 with 4GB (better yet, 8 to be safe) of RAM - and the docker container gets its own fast SSD, for storage - could do it. Forget using a Pi 4.

The Good News:

- I'm playing with Immich on a Raspberry Pi 5 in docker, really liking it. It took a long time to import my photos - several hours to do 10,000 photos.

- It's very nice to access from #Android or iPadOS, as there are Immich apps for both.

- It does a local AI facial recognition. I'm giving names to the faces - what a trip down memory lane! That's a rather astounding feature for such an open source app: it's awesome to see pictures which involved certain individuals, all grouped. There's been a lot of controversy around facial scanning by apps lately (the data being silently sent back to the "mothership"). With Immich, the data stays local - doesn't go back to any mothership. No geek contests or says otherwise (and I would hear about it).

- The Rasberry Pi 5 on the backend can keep up nicely - to me being the one user pretty much. Its little fan whirs away, while I do the editing, etc in the app, silently in the other room on the iPad.

- can publish web-accessible Albums online easily. Great for sharing albums to family and friends privately; they're password protected.

- I set up a reverse proxy on a VPS for remote access.

The Bad news:

- had to strip out the videos, before an import. The videos just brutally crushed that Pi to the floor.

- tried uploading all ~300 recent photos from my iPad to Immich. About 100 failed. Many are Jpgs, should have no problem. It does have a protection against duplicates - calculates hashes. Some uploads certainly failed (from the Immich #iPadOS app), which shouldn't have! Just saying: copyparty uploads with ~100% wire speed and *does not fail*. But it doesn't have the photo management goodness which Immich has. Copyparty will do a basic slideshow of a folder of photos. Although it annoys me to say this, I think I'll have to use Copyparty to exfil the photos out of the #iPad's (walled-garden) "Photo Library", then as a second, regrettable hop, use immich-cli (the go-based docker container) to do an import to Immich. I just did a test, comparing copyparty's "up2k" uploader (just used from a web browser like Safari of Firefox), and the Immich app in iPad OS, and there's no comparison. Copyparty absolutely rips Immich away, totally destroying it for bulk upload. I just uploaded over wifi at a steady, sustained 80MB/sec with Copyparty.

#Immich #Copyparty #OpenSource #SelfHosting

True story: my iPad (latest ver 26) - which regularly astounds me as to its ineptitude - would only save 2 of the 4 Superb #Owls recently posted this weekend on #Mastodon. It refused silently, to save the latter two in **exactly the same way** as the first two. I tried twice to save them. It gave no error message, but the owls weren't saved! So I shared the owls directly from #IceCubes into #Deltachat. Yes, that was allowed. So then all 4 could be shared onwards to a friend in #Signal.

My #iPad's disk is far from full, as I save very little into the walled garden. It's crazy, I tell you.

Note: I exfil everything - in bulk - periodically into #Copyparty, BTW.

The first two owls are OK on the iPad, but not the second two!

#Apple #iPadOS #nerdrage