How I Digitized Years of Home Videos and Photos with Immich

How I Digitized over 20 Years of Home Videos and Photos and Built an AI-Powered Pipeline into Immich I recently found myself staring at a closet full of MiniDV tapes, a stack of VHS cassettes, and many boxes of printed photos — roughly 20+ years of family memories sitting in formats that are one hardware failure away from being gone forever. My wife and I also had growing Apple Photos libraries on our Macs that were eating through iCloud storage. I wanted all of it — the tapes, the prints, the phone photos — in one place, searchable, and under my control. The answer for the primary library turned out to be Immich, a self-hosted Google Photos alternative, running on a Synology NAS. I chose a two-bay Synology with 6TB of usable storage (two drives configured as a mirror, so a single drive failure doesn't cost me anything) and bumped the RAM to 16GB, which left plenty of headroom for Immich's machine-learning and thumbnail-generation workloads. "Under my control" has its own anxieties, th