Immich 3.0

The strongest practical advice was to avoid thinking of Immich as the place that should own your only copy of the files. Several people pointed to External Libraries, where Immich indexes media from a read-only folder or NAS share instead of ingesting and rearranging uploads itself. That setup gives you a cleaner exit path, keeps file management outside the app, and makes large imports more reliable because Immich can scan files asynchronously instead of handling everything through the web UI. For people leaving Google Photos, the recurring recommendation was immich-go, which can parse Google Takeout metadata and even rebuild albums. That turned migration from a hand-wavy promise into something operators have actually done. Two rough edges kept coming up. First, iOS initial sync is still constrained by how Apple handles background work and large uploads. People with big libraries reported anything from a smooth overnight transfer to week-long stalls, and videos are still vulnerable because large uploads are not resumable. Second, self-hosting only feels carefree until upgrades or storage behavior bite you. A few users described broken migrations, corrupted databases, or confusing thumbnail behavior. Others pushed back that Immich is better than most self-hosted apps on backup and restore, and 3.0 appears to improve missing maintenance workflows like thumbnail regeneration. The overall read is that Immich has crossed from hobby demo to real replacement, but it still rewards operators who keep clean backups, understand their storage model, and do not expect Apple-grade sync behavior on iOS.