After going through 25 years of changing software every few years on this front I can’t be bothered. Files on disk. Nothing over the top. Immich is just another thing to maintain. Another problem which will result in a wholesale migration down the line.
If someone wants something I email it to them or upload it to a directory on a web server and send them the link. If I want something on my phone I’ll zap it over with localsend.
Photography is a hobby for me and I have a large family so I have a lot of photos. And a lot of editing to do. Currently moving from Lightroom to Darktable because again Lightroom tries to hammer me with library management and lock me into things.
That's cool, but when a friend died last summer, Immich allowed me to find all the digital photos I had of him, even out of focus in the background. I get many requests from friends for old pictures, "do you remember that night when we all did a group photo, etc etc?" and the search facility in Immich allowed me to in a minute what sometimes took years to find, when scouring folders in spare time.
For me, there's nothing like being able to search for "brown dog" and get all the photos of my dog back. Not to mention all the other things Immich has that make managing a library pleasant.
I not only urge you to try it, but to buy the "supporter" pack, Immich really deserves it.
A problem, but also way better than the solution “just look at every photo” you had without that image search feature.
I think these manual tools tend to prefer recall (“make sure you return all the photos asked for”) over precision (make sure you only return photos asked for”) because of that.
(Likely with exceptions for search terms such as “gorilla”, where surfacing photos of people with black skin is a big no-no)
Same here, although one thing that's difficult with this is things like finding "that one photo we took 5 years ago which grandma used as a phone background". So now I gotta find the right external hard drive to plug in and fortunately the folders are by date but still it's a drag. So I'm considering looking into immich if it can just function as a server that shows thumbnails on some terabytes of date-sorted photos and videoes, no need for the machine learning stuff. Though I feel like there must be a less "heavy" solution than immich for this.
There is no need to replace it, certain changes can be additive. Immich falls into that category - you can still just see/use them as ordinary files. It just makes finding/viewing/sharing/processing them easier on top.
This is exactly what I do. I have Immich as just a viewer and keep everything in external libraries. This is the major failure of Immich as far as I am concerned. I really don't like "black box" style of photomanagement. I also find that NextCloud has a very good photo viewer as well, which is almost as good as immich.
I'm like you, and a big fan of Pigallery2 precisely for its simplicity. But it turns out that Immich does support external libraries, so you can keep your manual file management in your filesystem and still use Immich for efficient indexing, face recognition, quick picture retrieval by year, location, people etc...
I'd recommend you try Immich (there's a docker compose version) and if you don't like it, you can just remove it and move on.
> After going through 25 years of changing software every few years on this front I can’t be bothered. Files on disk. Nothing over the top. Immich is just another thing to maintain. Another problem which will result in a wholesale migration down the line.
I've got the solution to this. I'm like you: files on disk. But I also use Immich: and here's the kicker... I pass the drive/volume with my photos to Immich as read-only (I use containers so it's easy: the drive itself is read-write, but Immich only has read-only access to it).
When I'm pissed off by Immich or something better comes along, I destroy the Immich containers and it's gone.
And I still my files on disk (with checksums as part of the filenames, moreover, seen that family JPG pictures aren't files that happen to change a lot and if they change, they can be renamed).
I think that's a very extreme take in the software industry. Sure you don't need to pick up every new trend, but a ridiculous amount has changed in the past 10 years. If you only consider stuff from 2016, you're missing some incredible advancements.
You'd be missing stuff like:
- Containers
- Major advancement in mainstream programming languages
- IaC
There's countless more things that enable shipping of software of a completely different nature than was available back then.
Maybe these things don't apply to what you work on, but the software industry has completely changed over time and has enabled developers to build software on a different scale than ever previously possible.
I agree there's too much snake-oil and hype being sold, but that's a crazy take.
It's not that I refuse to acknowledge they exist, just don't give a fuck. I mean do I really care about Kubernetes CNI? Nope it doesn't actually make any money - it's an operational cost at the end of the day. And the whole idea of Kubernetes and containers leads to a huge operational staffing cost just to keep enough context in house to be able to keep the plates spinning.
And it's not at all crazy. We sold ourselves into over-complex architecture and knowledge cults. I've watched more products burn in the 4-5 year window due to bad tech decisions and vendors losing interest than I care to remember. Ride the hype up the ramp and hope it'll stick is not something you should be building a business on.
On that ingress-nginx. Yeah abandoned. Fucked everyone over. Here we go again...
I can say that as someone that does this for a job for a while, it's starting to be useful in many domains related to SRE that make parts of the job easier.
MCP servers for monitoring tools are making our developers more competent at finding metrics and issues.
It'll get there but nobody is going to type "fix my incident" in production and have a nice time today outside of the most simple things that if they are possible to fix like this, could've been automated already anyway. But between writing a runbook and automating sometimes takes time so those use cases will grow.
But are the places you’re eating 1) fairly affordable and 2) quick / fast food and not a proper sit down restaurant?
I had an extremely difficult time finding places with those requirements. Everything seemed to require sitting down for at least 20-30 minutes, which didn’t fit my walking schedule.
I didn’t have the same problem in NYC or Paris, where it’s very easy to find a variety of places to grab a kebab, baguette sandwich, pizza slice, dumplings, etc.
Yeah definitely affordable and quick. And can get all of those in London with zero effort. Most of the time I just search for food on Google Maps and pick something which doesn't look poisonous.
If Apple watch said anything about that it's probably wrong. It can't accurately measure VO2 max.
Incidentally I got rid of mine recently. It is bliss not having one.
Also VO2 max is a crappy measure of fitness. I apparently had "average" VO2 max after a treadmill test. I can hike 50km with a 2km elevation gain in one go and not die. People with higher VO2 max I know, dropped out.
You’re not wrong. However - the Health app on the iphone (where you can view your health data) makes this VERY clear. Most people just don’t read.
I’ll quote:
“This is a measurement of your VO2 max, which is the maximum amount of oxygen your body can consume during exercise. Also called cardiorespiratory fitness, this is a useful measurement for everyone from the very fit to those managing illness.
A higher VO, max indicates a higher level of cardio fitness and endurance.
Measuring VO2 max requires a physical test and special equipment. You can also get an estimated VO, max with heart rate and motion data from a fitness tracker. Apple Watch can record an estimated VO max when you do a brisk walk, hike, or run outdoors.
VO, max is classified for users 20 and older. Most people can improve their VO, max with more intense and more frequent cardiovascular exercise.
Certain conditions or medications that limit your heart rate may cause an overestimation of your VO, max. VOz max is not validated for pregnant users. You can indicate you're taking certain medications or add a current pregnancy in Health Details.”
> hike 50km with a 2km elevation gain in one go and not die.
And thru-hikers can do this for days. It’s more related to fatigue resistance, mitochondrial density, and walking efficiency. But VO2 max still matters in high-intensity sports, you can’t ignore it when you’re pedaling a bike at high Zone 4 in a race.
Fuck all this pointless noise, verbose analysis, LLMs and other associated crap.
Just someone give me MS Access for the web with an SSO module and let me drive it.
That'd cover 99% of LOB app needs and allow me to actually get shit done without tools that dissolve in my hands or require hordes of engineers to keep running or have to negotiate with a bullshit generator to puke out tens of thousands of lines of unmaintainable javascript crap.
We have achieved nothing in the last 25 years if we can't do that. Everyone who entered the industry since about 2005 appears to be completely braindead on how damn easy it was to get stuff actually done back then.
I'll admit to having joined the industry after 2005.
Can you say more about how easy it was to get stuff done back then? What was actually easier? Was Access just good and you didn't need to deal with building web apps?
Access sucked. It didn’t scale. You could have a small team use one database just fine, but wiring it up to the other access databases was a nightmare. Version control was practically non-existent. Corrupt databases were routine. You would often have the “expert” that created the highly specific configuration depart the organization before anyone realized they were the only ones that held knowledge of who and what was connected to it. And don’t even get me started on the awful recorded macro code or insecure VBA.
Excel is arguably worse, if only because it was more accessible for less patient people. But at least Excel doesn’t offer you an entire armory of footguns at quite the same scale as Access did.
I think it's just nostalgia for a simpler, less complicated past. We do lots of things today that would've been impossible with Access and that we now take for granted. For example, most people today expect to access their system from anywhere via the internet; pulling up a specific invoice on their phone, for instance. That just wasn't possible with Access 2000. And if you tried building a web-accessible system on top of its database, you'd essentially be starting from scratch anyway.
The reality is that the web is complicated because we want endless possibilities while staying fully connected.
Most businesses don't really operate like that though. That's what has been sold to us as an idea and we are blinded by the environments we work within in the tech industry. Really a hell of a lot of it is bums on seats in offices still.
One of the hilarious things I've seen recently was an ex partner of mine's hair salon paid for a SaaS booking system. It's a pile of junk. Doesn't work properly, screws up scheduling and finances and generally costs more time that it does some other way.
They literally went back to a paper bookings diary and just phone or whatsapp people if there's a problem.
Sure, which is why roughly 2/3 of the world's desktops are still running Windows. I actually met an accountant the other day (from Germany) who still uses the desktop version of Microsoft Excel (not the 365 web edition) because the old version works fine for his needs while the web one doesn't.
> They literally went back to a paper bookings diary and just phone or whatsapp people if there's a problem.
I couldn't book a place the other day because their online booking system was broken. It made me realize why most places and hotels use Booking.com or Airbnb. It's not just about discoverability; getting a booking system to actually work is a really hard problem.
But look at these two examples: MS Access wouldn't help in either case. For a booking system to be useful, people need to access the calendar online. These are things only made possible with web or mobile apps. Booking.com and Airbnb have a combined market cap of around a quarter trillion dollars. That's how valuable a functioning booking system really is.
Version control was in issue yes but you didn't really need it because ONE PERSON could literally do all the engineering work. You just copied the MDB file and suffixed it with the date. In reality, corrupt databases were a non-issue if you didn't shove MDBs on a network share and VBA was not a security risk here because the distribution of the MDBs was controlled.
What you just described is a sample size of one. I spent ten years supporting a 30k+ person company and never saw Access used in reasonable ways. It was always on a network share, data always stored in the local file instead of SQL, “engineering” done entirely by a power user that got a book on MS Access at the bookstore instead of by anyone with actual engineering experience.
There’s a reason people in IT hate Access. It’s not because the technology. It’s because of what organizational bad habits the technology enabled.
Sample size is irrelevant. The problem is bad people, not bad software.
It ran a 50 seat ERP system that managed over 1000 suppliers and 500 customers, did all invoicing, inventory/stock management, logistics and financials. In the hands of clue that is.
They did replace it with SAP eventually but this was at a 15x per seat cost multiplication.
There is still is a lot of stuff hiding out there that works like that which is used daily and has few issues. You just don't hear about it because the people building and operating it really don't give a crap and have no enthusiasm - it's a tool to do a job. As it should be.
How is it conceptually different? RDBMS ORM-based web frameworks (with built-in Admin GUIs) ate the web-oriented crowd, and the rest are happy managing their data in Excel. That doesn't leave much room for MS Access.
How does that work? I find the ability to be in these positions as an IC really impossible nowadays. Maybe it was easier in the 90s? I heard contracting was a way better gig back then too, until corpos got all high and mighty about it putting an end to the practice by favoring head shops instead.
If someone wants something I email it to them or upload it to a directory on a web server and send them the link. If I want something on my phone I’ll zap it over with localsend.
Photography is a hobby for me and I have a large family so I have a lot of photos. And a lot of editing to do. Currently moving from Lightroom to Darktable because again Lightroom tries to hammer me with library management and lock me into things.
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