Immich 3.0 adds non-destructive editing — the thread argued about the feature it still doesn't have
The self-hosted Google Photos alternative shipped mobile editing that leaves originals intact, a drag-and-drop automation system, and live video transcoding. The comments spent their energy on end-to-end encryption, which Immich still doesn't do.
Version 3.0 is a real step: non-destructive crop/rotate/adjust on mobile, a Workflows automation engine, HLS on-the-fly transcoding, and integrity checks that catch missing or mismatched files. Breaking changes hit third-party integrations.
Encryption was the fault line. Several users said the lack of E2EE is why they picked Ente instead. A contrarian pushed back hard: for a home photo library, end-to-end encryption is arguably pointless — lose your keys and you lose the only copy of grandma. The sharpest bug report was an operator finding 20% of his disk eaten by duplicated per-user thumbnails.
What 3.0 actually ships
Immich v3.0.0 is a major release of the self-hosted Google/Apple Photos alternative (105k+ GitHub stars). The headline additions: non-destructive photo editing on mobile — crop, rotate and adjust without touching the original; a drag-and-drop Workflows automation system (preview) that chains triggers, filters and actions from shareable templates; HLS real-time video transcoding (preview, web-only) for on-the-fly quality/codec switching; a "Recently Added" view sorted by import date; and Integrity Checks that flag untracked files, missing files, and checksum mismatches between disk and database. It's not free of friction: breaking changes drop pgvecto.rs support, remove timeline-sync endpoints, and restructure error responses.
The comments were a referendum on encryption
The most common dealbreaker had nothing to do with the new features:
"I considered Immich, but I settled on Ente because of the encryption. Ente Photos is extremely polished and it's comparable quality to Apple photos." — a user who self-hosts after moving from iOS to GrapheneOS
Then a contrarian argued the whole demand is misguided for this use case:
"So many comments here about missing end to end encryption, but seriously - why would anyone want this?… in the more likely scenario that something happens to your phone, the lack of e2ee means that even if you lost your keys you didn't lose the only memories that remain of your grandma - you just copy across the .jpgs." — a long-time HN user making the case against E2EE for home photos
The most useful voice was an operator with a measurement, not an opinion:
"in order for every user to have their own facial recognition data… you have to add the folder as external storage for each user, which means image previews for each user… So if you have 3 users, you use up 3 times the space for the same thumbnail image. It got to where I had 20% of my space was just thumbnails." — a user running Immich with external storage across multiple accounts
That's the honest state of self-hosted photos in 2026: the feature list has caught up to the cloud incumbents, and the arguments have moved to the harder stuff — whether your memories should be encrypted from you, and whether "drop-in replacement" survives contact with a 20,000-photo iPhone library. A stalled multi-day iOS sync in the same thread suggests the last mile is still the hard mile.
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