Photo album and filing cabinet

Experimental setup

1. 01
   The photo album. Immich looks and feels like Google Photos. Every phone uploads new photos and videos by itself as soon as it is home. Faces, places and searching by content (“dog in the snow”) are worked out by Immich itself, in the house. Not a single photo goes to an outside service for it.
2. 02
   The filing cabinet. Paperless-ngx takes every letter, every invoice, every medical report. The scanner sends the scan straight in, Paperless reads the text and sorts by sender and date. You search by words, not by folders: “insurance 2023” is enough.
3. 03
   The family cloud. Nextcloud keeps files, calendars and contacts and syncs them with every phone and computer. The calendars also hang on the mirror. Whatever goes into one particular folder also lands in the filing cabinet.
4. 04
   The office. Collabora opens Word and Excel files right in the browser. Two people can write in the same document at once, without anybody mailing files around.
5. 05
   The notes. Affine for notes, lists and plans, with pages and whiteboards.
6. 06
   The key. Photos and cloud open with the passkey. The photos no longer have a password at all.

Why?

Twenty years of photos should not belong to a company that changes its prices tomorrow, shrinks the storage or feeds the pictures to its AI. And a letter from three years ago can only be found if it can be searched.

Test result

Passed. Almost fifty thousand photos and more than seven hundred documents, all in the house.

The catch: a photo album you run yourself is one you back up yourself. Every night the database and settings go to the NAS, and the originals reach it straight from the phones anyway. In November restoring was rehearsed: passed.

Immich source code Paperless-ngx source code Nextcloud source code