Immich Users Repurpose Gaming PCs and Macs for Accelerated Machine Learning Tasks
Users of Immich, a self-hosted photo and video management system, are finding innovative ways to accelerate machine learning (ML) tasks like face detection, smart search embeddings, and optical character recognition (OCR) by repurposing existing hardware. Instead of upgrading their primary server's GPU, users are leveraging more powerful machines, such as gaming PCs with NVIDIA cards or M4 MacBook Pros, as remote ML accelerators. This approach addresses the issue of ML queues backing up on underpowered servers, where CPU-only processing is insufficient for large photo libraries. For macOS users, a project called Immich Accelerator allows the native execution of Immich's microservices worker, utilizing Apple's Metal GPU and Neural Engine for significant performance gains, bypassing Docker's limitations on GPU access for Apple Silicon. Windows and Linux users with NVIDIA cards can achieve similar acceleration through Docker's direct GPU passthrough. 
