Hot take? This should have been a major version update.
Disclaimer ⚠️ The project is under very active development. ⚠️ Expect bugs and breaking changes. ⚠️ Do not use the app as the only way to store your photos and videos. ⚠️ Always follow 3-2-1 backup plan for your precious photos and videos!
Yes project does not follow semantic versioning. But you can consider it it the 0.y.z state where it is even in the semantic versioning allowed to have breaking changes without major version increase.
I am generally of the opinion that version numbers do not matter at all until the author/distributor has GUARANTEED that they do. Until then they’re worthless, including in places where semver is supposedly enforced like NPM. If I had a penny for every NPM package that broke my project after removing the package-lock.json, I could retire.
Absolutely agree with you. Just because the Versioning looks like x.y.z does not mean it follows that convention. The most prominent example is probably the Linux Kernel Versioning.
Read the notes of the dev team and subscribe to the changelog or update channel.
There are quite a few mature projects in 0.x that would cause a LOT of pain if they actually applied semver
Depending on how one defines the “initial development” phase, those projects are actually conforming to semver spec:
Major version zero (0.y.z) is for initial development. Anything MAY change at any time. The public API SHOULD NOT be considered stable.
Yep. Semver is so much more useful than the marketing versioning which many projects do.
Good share. I saw the nudge in the mobile app, but I didn’t realize there was breaking changes and upgraded in the middle of the night before bed (what the hell was I thinking???). Spent a good extra hour trying to figure out why.
Key take away, the
pgvecto.rsversion needs to be upgraded. If you are using docker, update the docker-compose.yml. If you’re not, upgrade yourpgvector.rsversion first. 🙏Thanks for posted. I didnt even notice. I just blindly did a pull. Lesson learned.
You can always set watchtower to blindly pull for you. If it’s going to be broken anyways, might as well automate the process.
Most of my containers do that but not the ones that break connection.
For someone freshly interested in self hosting, what does breaking changes with respect to immich really mean? Does it mean that if I upgrade to this version, I have to rebuild my library, face tags etc? Or does it mean that things might stop working and some files might need to be changed, upgraded manually and things may get awry in doing so.
I haven’t reviewed the changelog for this immich, but yes a breaking change typically means if you just went and updated you would have a broken system. sometimes something like you mentioned if a backend database is changed or db column attributes altered.
This scares me to an extent but as long as immich provides some instructions on what to do to get back on track, this should be okay.
Also, what happens if one skips multiple such breaking updates? Will it be my responsibility to hunt down the changes and make corresponding amends?
And finally, while I understand that immich is not supposed to be photo backup solution, does it allow export and import of metadata, tags etc? I ask because I intend to set it up and I may skip few of these updates and instead do a fresh install a year or so later. If I can simply export my settings, face ID info, albums from old setup and import it into the new one then it makes things very easy.
Otherwise the phrase breaking changes does sound really scary.
Yep
Yes
That part I haven’t read up on
Breaking changes are scary for running solutions. it is why IT has a mandate of “Never touch a running system” (security patches only)
Immich is a younger, quickly evolving project, so new features or improvements may justify breaking the upgrade path. There may be folks that share data migration tips when that happens. It is why in corporate world we never want to be on the latest version of something; let the non critical data users find the problems.
Also you may have seen this on the project page. Basically use at own risk until things mature:
⚠️ The project is under very active development. Expect bugs and changes. Do not use it as the only way to store your photos and videos!
As an example in an engineering software it had been forward compatible for 30 years, recently they changed the datatypes for certain expressions: some expressions that could be number type now were restricted to integer. This broke every formula built off of that expression type in legacy data. ugg
Normally a breaking change means after you apply the change it’s not easy/straightforward to rollback to the older version if you want to do that for whatever reason.
For example, a new version is released and underlying database table or structure changes. You upgrade properly, and find the new version has some bugs (or you simply don’t like it). If you want to use the older version again until the newer one is fixed it’s not a matter of simply point to old version.
As the database structure has fundamentally changed underneath in the new version, when you put back the old version it simply doesn’t understand the new structure and might stop working. You need ways to be able to make the DB structure compatible with the older application.
If the application is stable the devs might provide ways to do this. But since this is an alpha… You’re on your own.
TL;DR it means the older and newer version of the application aren’t strictly compatible with each other
Thanks for the heads up!
I got Immich running last week and it’s impressive.
The only thing I yearn for is a way to get the pictures to easily display on the cloaed-source frame we have.
Anyone know of a way to automatically email pictures added to an Immich album?
maybe you could look into ImmichFrame?
Thanks for the suggestion. I ended up using a Raspberry Pi and an old computer monitor to run MagigMirror and MMM-ImmichSlideShow.
I tried ImmichFrame, too, and will revisit it in the future. For now MMM-ImmichSlideShow is working well.
super! glad its working.
Cool - was trying to get set up with v1.94, but had real trouble getting pgvecto-rs to work properly, pgvector seems much more stable and better supported and was a breeze to get running
