[josephg]

Oh that looks lovely. I enjoy the UI and all the work on tagging and classification. But its still missing some features I want:

- I want native desktop apps

- I want P2P device sync. My laptop and my home server should be peers. Just with different rules for which photos are stored locally on each device.

- I want per-device storage rules. (Eg, "I want all my favorited photos, and recent photos up to 50gb on my laptop").

- Backups. I want to be able to plug in an external hard drive and backup my photos (with some rules). Then disconnect the drive and see in the metadata for those photos that I have a copy of the full res RAW on that drive.

But even if other programs exist, its still fun to make something myself. Authoring your own software gives you a different relationship with the computer. You're less of a consumer. You can change or tweak features on a whim. Psychologically, its kind of like being in your own home vs being in a hotel room. If you hate the furniture at home, you can move it or change it. You can decorate however you like. In a hotel, you're affected by your environment but you have no agency over it. I think its much more healthy to create.

[rrvsh]

You're not wrong, but a fork of Immich would achieve much of the same, no? I understand this is probably a detour from the conversation, but I've been thinking of doing the same to add some niceties

[josephg]

If my goal was to make something that fits in with the existing ecosystem and has the most users possible, I could do that. Try to make some changes which could possibly be upstreamed. Spend my time going back and forth on minutia in github pull requests. Learn Dart. Figure out how to wrap a typescript & dart app in a macOS native window. Or turn to electron. (Yuck.)

But I’m optimising for the feeling of joy and agency over my tools. I also want to experiment with p2p / local first data structures in a real app. I could fork immich and rewrite the data model. But that all seems much less fun.

At the end of the day, I’m not doing this for other people. I’m doing this for me. Learning dart so I can hack on someone else’s code sounds like a pain in the butt. Not like something I’d want to do for fun on the weekend.

Working on someone else’s code seems like a strange default. You and others have jumped on me for wanting to make my own thing instead of using - or forking - someone else’s software. Can you help me understand why? Why would that be the default for a fun hobby project? I’m confused.

[rrvsh]

No, I'm not jumping on you. I'm asking why not base your personal software on Immich so you get the benefits of a mature (ish) software. Sorry if it came off that way, but I'm not saying you need to share it - I'm saying why not make a personal fork instead of building your own from scratch