I gave it a try a few months ago. Unfortunately, my experience was not that great. I was hosting it on Synology through Docker and found that the iOS client was a bit buggy and quite slow. Synology Photos completed the initial sync in a few hours, while Immich took several days. After a few months, I switched back to Synology Photos. I might try Immich again in the future.
I started looking for alternatives after Synology became more restrictive with their hardware. I'm curious if anyone else has had a similar experience.
Long time synology user. Switched 3 weeks ago to ugreen. They rolled back their fiasco decision about drives (synology), but I wanted some good hardware in 2025. Everything that synology offers is outdated and slow.
Got myself a 6800 pro. It chewed through 98k photos, many of which are raw, within 24h AFAIK. Then came face recognition, text recognition etc. Within 2-3 days all was done.
The performance is night and day. Photos and movies load instantly. Finally can watch home movies on my TV without stuttering (4k footage straight from a nikon).
The photos app is similar to the synology one. Face recognition was better for me. Have compared the amount of photos tagged to a few people and ugreen found 15% more. Have seen photos of my grandma which I didn't see for years!
There's much more positive i could say. For the negatives: no native drive app (nextcloud which supposedly was an alternative doesn't sync folders on android), no native security cam app.
I am running now 10 docker containers without a sweat. My ds920+ was so slow, that I gave up on docker entirely after a few attempts.
The photos app has some nice features which synology didn't have. Conditional albums. Baby albums.
My guess would be that Synology is an expensive but weak computer, bare minimum for NAS.
Immich does require some CPU and also GPU for video transcoding and vector search embedding generation.
I had Immich (and many other containers) running successfully on AMD Ryzen 2400G for years. And recently I upgraded to 5700G since it was a cheap upgrade.
It varies from person to person because everyone uses search differently. Someone I know swears by it and loves it. I tried it for three months using only Kagi and it didn’t feel worth it to me, so I went back to Google. Your experience might be different so my suggestion is to try it yourself if you can.
Clara:
- Small form factor. Super convenient to read and bring it anywhere.
- No issue to read any materials imo.
Libra:
- It's slightly bigger and heavier.
- I find it easier to read books with lots of graph, images since it's bigger.
- I can also read comics with color. Pretty awesome.
Imo, boils down to your preference, hand size (I'm not a big guy). I like both devices. Libra main advantage to me is just color. Size is personal preference. If there's any store nearby, I'd suggest to just go and try it out first (or any ebook with similar size).
I've migrated from Synology Photos. It's pretty seamless, since Immich now supports External Library. I use Docker Compose in Synology, so basically all I have to do is just mount existing Synology Photos folders to Immich. Works fine, no issue so far.
However, I'm back to Synology Photos. I'm using Immich iOS apps. The upload/syncing is noticeably a lot slower than Synology. Gave it a few months, but it's not getting any better. Moved back to Synology Photos for now.
Have you tried context7 MCP? For things that are not mainstream (like Javascript, Typescript popularity), LLM might struggle. I usually have better result with using something like context7 where it can pull up more relevant, up to date examples.
I only use 2 MCP servers, and those are context7 and perplexity. For things like updated docs, I have it ask context7. For the more difficult technical tasks where I think it's going to stumble, I'll instruct Claude Code to ask perplexity and that usually resolves it. Or at least it'll surface up to me in our conversation so that we both are learning something new at that point.
For some new stuff I'm working on, I use Rails 8. I also use Railway for my host, which isn't as widely-used as a service like Heroku, for example. Rails 8 was just released in November, so there's very little training data available. And it takes time for people to upgrade, gems to catch up, conversations to bubble up, etc. Operating without these two MCP servers usually caused Claude Code to repeatedly stumble over itself on more complex or nuanced tasks. It was good at setting up the initial app, but when I started getting into things like Turbo/Stimulus, and especially for parts of the UI that conditionally show, it really struggled.
It's a lot better now - it's not perfect, but it's significantly better than relying solely on its training data or searching the web.
I've only used Claude Code for like 4 weeks, but I'm learning a lot. It feels less like I'm an IC doing this work, and my new job is (1) product manager that writes out clear PRDs and works with Claude Code to build it, (2) PR reviewer that looks at the results and provides a lot of guidance, (3) tester. I allocate my time 50%/20%/30% respectively.
Thanks, I’ll check out Perplexity. We seem to be using a similar stack. I’m also on Rails 8 with Stimulus, Hotwire, esbuild, and Tailwind.
Playwright MCP has been a big help for frontend work. It gives the agent faster feedback when debugging UI issues. It handles responsive design too, so you can test both desktop and mobile views. Not sure if you know this, but Claude Code also works with screenshots. In some cases, I provide a few screenshots and the agent uses Playwright to verify that the output is nearly pixel perfect. It has been invaluable for me and is definitely worth a try if you have not already.
I didn’t realize screenshots worked until a few days in, that was a great discovery. And recently learned you can directly paste in copied screenshots using ctrl+v (instead of cmd+v on a Mac).
Similar experience. Although, recently just tried Claude Code and it seems to be a pretty good upgrade (both Sonnet and Opus). I'd suggest you to give it a try if you haven't. For UI, Playwright MCP helps a lot. And since it can run rspec too, it can get faster feedback.
To me it is better now, but not as good as certain languages. Since that I'm using Go as well, I do notice Claude Code perform better with Go.
I started looking for alternatives after Synology became more restrictive with their hardware. I'm curious if anyone else has had a similar experience.
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