Immich has become my goto photo storage setup. I transitioned from Gphotos almost 2 years ago. The experience has been pretty good so far.

Using the text-based search function in the library often gave inaccurate results. Since it’s an open-source app, I thought I had to live with it—until I found an option in the admin settings to switch to a different ML model for search indexing. That changed everything! The results truly blew my mind, and now search is as good as Google Photos. Here’s what I did.

There are several ML models available specifically for this process. You can find them here

Choose the one according your system resources. I have went with this –>‘ViT-B-16-SigLIP-256__webli’. 

Remember to take sufficient backups before attempting any of this.

Copy the model name and paste in this path ( Administration > Settings > Machine Learning Settings > Smart Search). After that we need to rerun ‘Smart Search’ from admin jobs.

My setup took about 12 hours to index almost 55k files. 

The search has improved significantly in both accuracy and speed. The model I used is fairly mediocre, so imagine how well higher-end models could perform. Give it a try!.

Also kudos to the amazing devs of Immich