Immich is a self-hosted, open-source photo and video backup platform that gives you a Google Photos-like experience on your own server. It bundles a web server, PostgreSQL database, Redis cache, and a machine learning service into a single Docker Compose stack that you can deploy in minutes. The catch is that nearly every setup failure … Read more
If your Immich machine-learning container keeps restarting in a loop right after you upgraded Immich, the fastest fix is usually to set IMMICH_HOST=0.0.0.0 in your .env file, then run docker compose pull && docker compose down && docker compose up -d from your Immich folder. That single combination resolves the majority of restart-loop reports we … Read more
If you run a self-hosted Immich server and your CPU spikes to 100 percent every time someone uploads a video, you are not alone. Learning how to enable hardware transcoding in Immich with VAAPI and NVENC is the single biggest performance upgrade you can make, and it takes about 15 minutes once you know the … Read more
I run Immich on a Raspberry Pi 4 with two external HDDs holding about 28,000 family photos. So when my external library stopped scanning new photos last month, I lost an entire weekend debugging it before I found the real cause: a missing mount propagation flag in my docker-compose.yml. If your Immich external library won’t … Read more
Paperless-ngx is one of the best self-hosted document management systems you can run. It automatically ingests, OCRs, tags, and stores your scanned files so you never have to dig through a filing cabinet again. The whole workflow hinges on one feature: the consume folder, a watched directory where you drop files and let the system … Read more
If you have opened a freshly consumed document in Paperless-ngx and seen nonsense characters, random symbols, or pages filled with Chinese-looking glyphs where your English invoice should be, you have hit the classic Paperless-ngx OCR failure. The text is technically searchable but practically useless. I have run into this on three different self-hosted setups and … Read more
If your Paperless-ngx auto tagging rules keep quiet when you drop a new PDF into the consume folder, the problem is rarely your keywords. The problem is almost always timing, trigger selection, or classifier training data. I have rebuilt tagging workflows for self-hosted archives of 50,000+ documents and I have seen the same five failure … Read more
Setting up Home Assistant behind Nginx Proxy Manager with trusted proxies and WebSockets takes about 30 minutes if your network is ready. Install Nginx Proxy Manager, create a Proxy Host pointing at your Home Assistant IP on port 8123, enable WebSocket support, request a Let’s Encrypt certificate, then add the proxy IP to trusted_proxies in … Read more
Fixing Zigbee2MQTT entities that show “unavailable” after restarting Home Assistant is one of the most common headaches in smart home automation. You reboot Home Assistant for a routine update, and suddenly every Zigbee sensor, switch, and light reports as unavailable — even though the devices are still paired and working fine inside Zigbee2MQTT’s own frontend. … Read more
Swapping out a Zigbee coordinator used to mean touching every bulb, sensor, and switch in your home. I have helped network owners migrate across Texas Instruments, Silicon Labs, and Nabu Casa hardware, and the modern path is genuinely painless when you follow the right order. This guide shows you how to migrate a Home Assistant … Read more