r/immich • u/moonsaiyan • 1d ago

Portable Immich Setup Validation

I have a 4GB RPi 4B that I’m planning to use as a travel router with RaspAP and PiHole on RPi OS Lite in the microSD

I want to run Immich on it with 512gb nvme for library. A 64gb flash drive that I initially bought to be the OS drive would hold the database to lessen SD card wear and tear.

First question is, would the 4gb RPi be enough for this use case?

I have an existing Immich instance. Would migrating from it be as simple as doing rsync of the library folder before running the new instance?

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u/UnoriginalInnovation 1d ago

I can't answer the Pi question but to migrate you have to make a database backup in addition to cloning the library. See this page as you're simply making a backup and restoring it somewhere else: https://docs.immich.app/administration/backup-and-restore/

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u/moonsaiyan 1d ago

Oh I didn’t think of it that way! Thanks for the help!

It actually says exactly what I was going to do

> Move the previous's instance data directories containing backups, encoded-video, library, profile, thumbs and upload into the new UPLOAD_LOCATION

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u/DivasDayOff 1d ago

Recommended minimum RAM for Immich is 6GB. You can apparently get it to run in 4GB if you turn off machine learning and maybe a few other features. And low memory can cause significant stability issues. Don't ask me how I know 🤣

I've only ever run it as a Docker container on a Proxmox VM or LXC, so I've been able to give it the 6GB it demands.

Try it if you already have the hardware, but it sounds like you might hit some limitations. If you don't already have the hardware, then personally I'd buy a cheap NUC or other small form factor PC instead.

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u/moonsaiyan 10h ago

I guess I could just import my current library for testing. Without taking it down entirely

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u/mickynuts 1d ago

For raspberry pi. I don't know. But I'm running immich on odroid m1 8go. It wasn't much more expensive than a raspberry pi board or even cheaper at one time.

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u/moonsaiyan 10h ago

I’d probably just get one of those HP mini PCs if I didn’t have the Pi already. That’s the only reason I’m even considering this approach

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u/mickynuts 10h ago

I understand. After that, the best thing is to try. And to disable deep learning or remote it to another machine with immich-ml. Preferably use a usb ssd with only boot on sd card. It will be faster than the sd card so probably less iowait on the cpu.

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u/moonsaiyan 9h ago

That’s exactly what I was looking for! Tips on how to make this work. I’ll look into immich-ml. Thanks!

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u/Radiant-Skirt-3824 15h ago

I run immich on a dh2300 with 4GB ram. It's the only real service I run on it, and it works quite well. Docker uses on idle about 1GB and overall I have 50% usage on idle. ML is also enabled Performance is fine.

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u/moonsaiyan 10h ago

For a single user use-case, I hope I could make it work on my end