Welcome to version v1.109.0 of Immich. This release introduces an additional way for you to support Immich financially as well as bug fixes for various issues. Some of the highlights in this release include:
- Immich licenses (and https://buy.immich.app)
- “My Immich” url forwarder (https://my.immich.app)
- Notable fix: Generate thumbnail for iOS18 HEIC
- Notable fix: Generate Motion Photos for Pixel 6, 7, and 8
Immich license pricing is $25 per user or $99 per server for a lifetime license.
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They could have achieved the same without any license keys. Just a “Purchase” button along with an “Already purchased” one. You make the ethical judgement as to which one to click. The purchase page could have a few suggested prices along with a pay what you want option, one time and recurring.
Also I’m not too sure why FUTO are allergic to the term Donate. There’s a whole generation of people who got taught how it works an what it does be Wikipedia. Slap a funding bar with a brief explanation for what it finds, add the donation options and everyone would know what’s it about and why they should donate if they can.
Anyway. Purchased the thing and I’ll keep supporting them till it’s GPL.
I think it’s a psychological barrier, donate implies totally optional.
License, purchase, makes it more transactional mentally, and tries to make it clear that this project needs support to be sustainable.
Nothing like that is ever acceptable to show up on the dashboard of a service I am self hosting. Will not update Immich anymore unless they remove this garbage.
Is feel a lot better about this if it was a “supporter” tag not this “unlicensed” crap.
Yeah this terminology just gives me the impression they don’t consider the AGPL to an actual license
It also raises red flags about what they (hopefully don’t) have in mind for the future
They should just have you pay to have your name listed on the list of supporters
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters Git Popular version control system, primarily for code HASS Home Assistant automation software HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web nginx Popular HTTP server
[Thread #878 for this sub, first seen 19th Jul 2024, 06:45] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I wanted to like immich but I hate the way it imports images and creates its own structure.
It’s had an external library feature for awhile now
I am importing my externally synced and managed library to immich. It does not create any structure or edit the files.
Why does FUTO have to shoot itself in the foot?
There is as far as I can tell no new actual license just a payment scheme and some shaming functionality. They even offer you the software if you don’t pay. Remember the GPL allows them to require payment to give you the software, they just can’t prohibit someone else giving you the software.
However calling unpaid copies unlicensed is incorrect, they are licensed under the GPL (just like paid ones are).
They should remove references to licensing and display something like “This instance of Immich has been paid/not been paid for.” Call the key PRODUCT key.
Sure some find the “pay or shame” scheme distasteful but it is not against the GPL which allows commercial use.
For me, the license stuff is odd. They offer a license model with two tiers (user / server), yet the license seems to do nothing (except showing a little badge). Also, it is a one time payment which will likely not be substantial in the future.
Why not create a “supporter” tier for maybe $2 per month or so, this would bring some recurring income without the fears of paywalling the product.
That would make sense. They could even give you a badge or send you merch if you are a bigger supporter.
Stuff like this is why I can’t support FUTO
They already accept donations as a means of continuous support. So I guess this is now just another channel for people who prefer buying a license over using github donations.
Edit: oh I just realized they stopped donations with the restructuring. Ok, that’s weird then.
How dare you pay continued support. You will have a one time fee and be happy.
I can’t wait until they make you hand enter a 30 character license key
They’ll supply a giant paper manual, and you’ll have to look through it to find the key. DRM, 1980s style.
… each time the server restart and randomly during login.
I will wait for the “AIO Immich Ultimate Keygen” by Razor1911 ☝🏻😂
Ok, that’s weird then.
FUTO’s goal is to change FOSS culture. Away from “donations” and towards “payment”, to make development sustainable.
I think they have succeeded in pissing people off
Change usually does.
Yeah but why not both? Extra support shouldn’t hurt.
We don’t have both.
The only problem is that there’s no way to make a recurring payment even if I wanted to, which would be more sustainable than one-time purchases.
Then don’t 🤷 you don’t have to.
They have always planned to have continual revenue by offering their own hosting services similar to paid google photos after Immich goes stable. This is just another odd way of doing donations that Futo uses for stuff like Greyjay.
They completely miss the point of free software. The idea is that you can fork it after a hostel take over. The irony is that if they start forcing anti features they might end up with the community jumping ship.
This is basically the doing of the futo non profit, they ate testing out if open source software can be profittable.
Louis Rossmann has a lot of videos about them (he works for them)
From what I get, you can just use it for free, but they don’t say it is free to compell more people to buy it.
So basically WinRAR
I like having more ways to support the project, but I don’t think “license” is the correct terminology they should use, unless they intend to release paid-only features which I’m not a fan of at all.
Wish end to end encryption was on their roadmap
If Immich can’t analyze the images on the server then its feature set would be quite limited. It’s meant for self hosting anyway, you don’t trust your own hardware?
you don’t trust your own hardware?
no, I do not. Thats the whole reason data at rest should be encrypted.
So you trust your phone and its closed source OS with your photos, but your Linux server can’t see them?
I’m having a hard time imagining what Immich could do other than file syncing in this scenario
My phone isn’t closed source. And no, I don’t trust it fully either, I limit the amount of trust given to any datastream to the minimum necessary to get the functionality I want.
If you wanted a client side encrypted image service, yes syncing would be a major benefit, or you do the image tagging/scanning client side before going to the cloud, or after the fact. Just limit where the unencrypted data exists in the system.
Ok, that’s totally fair. Your needs are valid, but most of us just want a self-hosted google photos replacement that’s good enough our families won’t complain. Just being self hosted improves security and privacy immensely; E2EE would be an incremental improvement in this regard while having major drawbacks for usability.
oh yeah, 100%; I like the focus of immich, I like that it exists, we are all better for the option.
I was just wishing up thread that client side encryption was in the roadmap, if for no other reason that when they make architectural decisions now they leave some room for a encrypted block pivot.
not sure about drawbacks though; what does a cloud photo provider do? 99.9999999% of the time its just blocks at rest on disk; Sometimes it does image recognition, face recognition, and photo sharing; All 3 of these can be done in a end to end encrypted way (yes, with a few more hoops, it would add work, no doubt)
Https is end to end encryption and doesn’t need to be on their road map
Encryption at rest could be an option but seeing as how many other projects have trouble with it (nsxtcloud), its probably best to have this at the fike system level with disc encryption
Small nit: Https is transport layer encryption, not commonly considered end-to-end encryption.
For the end-to-end encryption model to work, the data must be encrypted entirely from the sender to the recipient. In the model of immich That’s yourself.
But you’re right, I should have been clearer, client-side encryption, encryption at rest are better terms. But I don’t want the server to ever see the unencrypted data ideally unless I am physically there requiring it to do so.
I’ll repeat here what I said on discord:
I’m no fan of stallman, but I like his quote: “I’m happy to pay for good software so long as it’s free”.
It’s important to remember that anyone with the skill to work on this project could earn a pretty good living elsewhere. We can debate the terminology, but at the end of the day devs gotta eat.
Personally, so long as it stays on the GPL they can call us “god-kings” and “filthy peasants” for all I care
Important bits that came up in the discord and I haven’t seen here:
- User license is only there to make it cheaper for small instances.
No word I’ve seen on transitioning from a user license to a server license down the road.Looks like you can switch by contacting them, and they have plans to do it automatically in the future. - It looks like enforcement is basically nonexistent. You could activate multiple servers with one license, or just flip a value in the db yourself
- The reason they aren’t using “supporter” or “contributor” is because they don’t want it to sound like charity. It’s a transaction.
Immich is free software. That means anyone can fork and maintain the code and they have the same rights as everyone. Trying to squeeze money out of people is slimy. They should either stay a community project and ask for donations to fund it (paid versions count as donations as long as there isn’t extra exclusive features implemented in non libre code) or they could start a company that sell backups and support.
Selling copies of free software is straight up encouraged by the FSF. You don’t have to buy a copy. You can copy the source code and build t yourself. But selling it is legitimate.
I don’t have problems with selling software. I do have a problem with what FUTO is doing. The just up ended a perfectly good financial model and make the “licensing” feel like Windows server.
As you said it’s free software, and the license for immich is actually open source. I’m not really offended by a please donate nagware screen, or even a give a cup of coffee to the developer, so this license is the same thing just with different language. And as it’s open source somebody could fork the project to remove this line, or you could edit the database and fill it, it’s totally up to you.
I think this is a net positive and should be encouraged
It is just bizarre
- User license is only there to make it cheaper for small instances.
My biggest question to FUTO/Immich is if they’re worried about a revenue stream, why not do something similar to Home Assistant? You never have to pay HASS a dime and never see anything to “shame” you. All you get is essentially a forwarding subdomain with some “easier” ways of doing cloud related things. There’s zero “shaming” or calls to pay. I pay HASS/Nabu Casa monthly cause I’m lazy and it makes my life easier. FUTO should consider doing something similar.
Same with jellyfin.
They basically don’t accept recurrent donations on purpose
If and when Jellyfin “needs” revenue, 100% agree. But with that post they’re saying they’re not worried about it, unlike FUTO/Immich.
Hopefully one day Jellyfin will be big enough and stable enough to warrant that kind of funnel.
Right now, I use TailScale funnel for Jellyfin. For some reason nginx just bogs it down too heavily.
I use nginx reverse proxy on Jellyfin (and a bunch of other services as well) and it’s working great. Maybe you have some weird setup or complex situation.
I have a boat load of stuff thru nginx. Using nginx-proxymanager. Dunno if I need to add any special parameters for Jellyfin. Tailscale Funnel is working fine for now.
If you could share your settings for your nginx setup, that might help me.
I don’t use NPM but directly nginx. All my nginx general setup and per-service specific settings are here: https://wiki.gardiol.org
There is a global page for the reverse proxy, and then each service I tried/use has its own setup page.
After listening the video where they discussed immich joining futo, I don’t have any worries. I have high hopes futo might actually be the company I have long hoped would emerge. Time will certainly tell.
I think people are getting hung up on the word license too much. Though I agree futo should have gone with a better word choice for clarity. License just means supporter in this case.
I can’t say I support FUTO but if they are looking to drive development I am all for it
Does this mean I have to pay to use immich now? Huh?
No. It will remain free. Your experience of immich will be identical to someone with a paid “licence”. It’s like a donation.
Except that it will taunt you on your dashboard.
See this comment here which has some CSS you can put into the custom CSS box to hide it.
It just says you are unlicensed on the webapp. They also said no features will every be locked behind it.
From Discord
Copy this to custom CSS in the adminpanel and the license banner is gone:
.license-status{ display:none !important; }It is possible to set the status to licensed too vua the database, but I didn’t try it.
I hope it will only be this banner. Kavita has had a donation button too and 2 updates further it was a floating button. The whole thing about licensing is heavily discussed on Discord.
Yep and eventually there will be a paid proprietary version. That’s usually how it goes. I hope I am wrong.
They promised at least that’s not how they’re going to do this, at least. But in the end, it’s easy to backpaddle on these promises.
In the end: you can always fork the project.
Who is? That’s the problem with forks. They always divide the community into slices
I don’t think that there’ll be a community for a project that turned proprietary.
Why not? There are some popular examples, like mysql --> mariadb or elasticsearch --> opensearch
I meant for the propietary branch.
I don’t think it’s possible to make this project proprietary because FUTO does not own the rights to the code that were made by random contributors on git. Part of the promise was that they won’t change their CLA so it should be fine.
Would be very difficult to switch licenses away from GPL3
While true it is not impossible to relicense a software project.
They would have to track down everyone who has ever contributed to the project and convince them to sign a CLA. Many/most would refuse, whose code they would have to rewrite from scratch without violating their copyright (meaning no copy-pasting).
It would be messy and extremely painful, and at the end of the process we’d still have Immich as it was before the license change available to fork and maintain ourselves.
They only need the biggest contributors. Small contributions like single line or even a few lines edits etc. are not eligible for copyright. Also minor contributions can be easily rewritten.
Most ppl you will get with a paycheck.
… at which point we could still fork the project from before the license change and continue on our merry way.
If you expect ongoing maintenance, are you saying you feel entitled to the devs’ continuing work in perpetuity, and at no cost? Because that’s called slavery and we have laws against it.
If you expect ongoing maintenance, are you saying you feel entitled to the devs’ continuing work in perpetuity, and at no cost? Because that’s called slavery and we have laws against it.
Stop putting words in my mouth.
They would need to do a private rewrite. Once again this is why you should never sign any kind of CLA. There isn’t a CLA here but it there were it would be a simple matter of them changing the license.
If worse comes to shovel the community could fork it. That would be very hard and seriously detrimental but if they start pulling crap like this it might be time.
I just hope they don’t destroy this beautiful product.
Immich joined FUTO, and FUTO’s model is that their stuff costs money but if you haven’t paid you’re not restricted.
A bit weird but they (FUTO) are trying to experiment with a new model.
FUTO is the same organization that doesn’t believe in Foss. The want one creator to have power over users. I don’t think that model is going to work out.
That’s not quite their position. They believe the OSI decides what counts as Open Source based on what benefits big tech who fund them. Basically, they think it’s wrong to argue that something cannot be considered open source unless Google is allowed to use the free labour of contributers without restriction or payment.
They talk more about it here and here.
Personally I don’t have a side in this fight but nothing I have seen has made me shy away from using their products.
It isn’t open source or free software. There software prevents you from having the same rights as the parent organization. You can’t fork the project if there is a big development shift you don’t like so it is effectively proprietary.
Yes you can, you just cant change the payment links
Sorry I though you were talking about Grayjay.
Tbh it’s the English language that decides what counts as Open Source. Free/Open Source software has been established for decades at this point. It’s good that they changed the name to “Source First”.
I think that better wording would be “the organization that doesn’t believe that foss solves every problem”. For project like immich AGPL is completely fine but for the android keyboard it might not be a good idea to allow Google to use it to abuse their customers.
