Hundreds of gigabytes of photos and videos scattered across three Windows drives, accumulated over ~15 years of phones, digital cameras, film rolls, and photography work.

I wanted to solve this by self-hosting Immich, but file transfer is slow and the setup is painful, so I kept avoiding the task — until last month, when I used Claude Code to finally kickstart the operation.

PhotoOps

I ran Claude Code from /mnt/ in WSL2. All my PC drives mounted at /mnt/c, /mnt/d, /mnt/g, plus a new 4 TB external HDD at /mnt/q as a physical backup target. I gave Claude Code clear goals and we brainstormed the plan together. The first step was creating order locally. We built a pipeline that walks every drive and moves images out to /mnt/q — and since the run took hours, I made sure it was resumable so it could pick up after any error/crash.

1. Index — walked all in-scope folders, captured EXIF date/camera, extracted folder-derived tags. Final result: 115,290 files, 649 GB.
2. Hash — SHA-256 every file.
3. Dedupe by content — 17,065 duplicate groups, 21,160 redundant copies = 102 GB of pure waste. A selection algorithm picked one survivor per group with rules like: prefer organized paths, penalize Dupes/ and UUID filenames, prefer the more recently curated drive.
4. Quarantine, don't delete — copied all 21,160 duplicates to /mnt/q/PhotoQuarantine/ before touching originals.
5. Consolidate — 92,945 files (547 GB) into /mnt/q/PhotoArchive/YYYY/YYYY-MM-DD/filename.ext.

The infra, ~€13/mo

Hetzner Cloud + a Hetzner Storage Box, all managed as IaC:

Photos live on the Storage Box, not the volume. SSHFS-mount it at /mnt/photos and point Immich's upload directory there. Slight network latency but big cost savings.

Uploading and importing

Photo upload: immich-cli upload --recursive /mnt/q/PhotoArchive/. ~547 GB over a WiFi took multiple sessions.

• 606 albums rebuilt from folder structure. 44 got renamed from numeric folder IDs (e.g. 132 → "Tel Aviv 2019") via lookup against a hand-curated film-catalog.tsv of my film rolls.

Access via Tailscale

The server is reachable only on my tailnet — no public ports open except SSH. Tailscale runs as a background VPN on my phone so the Immich mobile app was very simple;

Notes

Having everything finally organized has been great — I'm seeing photos I hadn't looked at in years. Immich's embedding search is genuinely useful: queries like black and white, desert plane just work. And the whole setup follows the 3-2-1 backup strategy, which keeps data-loss risk low.

Overall a total of 93k photos, 547 GB, searchable, ML-tagged, organized into albums and film-roll metadata, on a €13/mo stack I can rebuild from tofu apply with some environment variables.