I self-host Immich for my photo library, and it has broken on me in two completely different ways — both instructive, and both sharing a reassuring punchline: the photos were always fine. The failures were in the plumbing around them, not the data.

The first was a storage problem wearing a data-corruption costume: thousands of “unsupported image format” and “input file is missing” errors for files that were perfectly healthy. The second was a self-inflicted supply-chain problem: an overnight auto-update yanked the database extension out from under the server and put it in a boot loop. This post is both stories, because together they’re a decent field guide to operating Immich in a homelab.