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EU photo solution | Immich on Hetzner

7d 7h ago by lemmy.ml/u/MikeGrey in buyeuropean@feddit.uk from blog.sivak.eu

My path to EU hosted Immich instance on Hetzner servers (Germany + Finland)

In the post you can find:

  • Why Immich
  • Why Hetzner
  • Repository with examples
  • Backup strategy
  • Cost comparison

Hope you will enjoy this post

I've been self-hosting immich from my living room since 2024 (accessible from outside via a Wireguard VPN tunnel). It's the single thing that got me into self-hosting because it's just so good! Even if you don't want to go down the whole server rabbit hole, it's trivial to just set it up on your everyday desktop or laptop and have all your picture synced there.

I have done the same and it is amazing.

Small comment. If instead of a storage box you use storage share, it's 1 extra Euro a month but gives you a Dropbox instance for that Tb, so you can have backups + personal files.

Good point, unfortunately Storage Share is only hosted in Germany and I wanted to try their Finland option so I have my backup in a different country.

But yes, this is also a way, thanks for pointing it out

Thank you for sharing this!

Quick question: did you set up any encryption to prevent Hetzner from seeing your photos? That's usually the topic that keeps coming up when people say they prefer to self-host Immich on their own hardware

Unfortunately Immich doesn't encrypt photos on its own and Hetzner also doesn't offer out-of-the-box encryption at rest.

Per Immich thread on github you should encrypt the whole volume by yourself via LUKS or similar

Thank you, that's what I thought.

What is your stance on this? Are you ok with storing photos unencrypted on Hetzner?

I was thinking about it and yeah, I don't see a scenario in which Hetzner will check my photos/disk since that would cause immediate push-back and many people would leave Hetzner platform.

In the future I would like to move to my own NAS so for the time being it seemed as a best solution (I would still probably use Hetzner Storage Box for backups though)

Thank you !