Immich is an amazing piece of software, but because it holds such personal data I have only ever felt comfortable accessing it via VPN or mTLS. This meant that I could never share any photos, which had been really bugging me.

So I built a self-hosted app, Immich Public Proxy, which allows you to share individual files or full galleries to the public without ever exposing your Immich instance. This uses Immich’s existing sharing functionality, so other than the initial configuration everything else is handled within Immich.

Why not just expose Immich publicly with Traefik / Caddy / etc?

To share from Immich, you need to allow public access to your /api/ path, which opens you up to potential vulnerabilities. It’s up to you whether you are comfortable with that in your threat model.

This proxy provides a barrier of security between the public and Immich. It doesn’t forward traffic to Immich, it validates incoming requests and responds only to valid requests without needing privileged access to Immich.

Demo

You can see a live demo here, which is serving a gallery straight out of my own Immich instance.

Features

  • Supports sharing photos and videos.
  • Supports password-protected shares.
  • Creating and managing shares happens through Immich as normal, so there’s no change to your workflow.

Install

Setup takes about 30 seconds:

  1. Take a copy of the docker-compose.yml file and change the address for your Immich instance.

  2. Start the container: docker-compose up -d

  3. Set the “External domain” in your Immich Server Settings to be whatever domain you use to publicly serve Immich Public Proxy. Now whenever you share an image or gallery through Immich, it will automatically create the correct public path for you.

For more detail on the steps, see the docs on Github.

  • alanOPEnglish
    14·
    10 days ago

    You’re correct - it is indeed taking input requests and requesting the related data from Immich.

    How is this adding more security than any other proxy?

    To allow sharing with Immich using a normal reverse proxy like Caddy or Traefik, you need to expose public access to the Immich /api/ path, along with a few other potentially dangerous paths. Any existing or future vulnerability has the potential to compromise your Immich instance.

    This proxy is more secure as it does not allow public access to the Immich API path or to any Immich path. The only incoming requests which are honoured are requests like this:

    https://your-proxy-url.com/share/ffSw63qnIYMtpmg0RNvOui0Dpio7BbxsObjvH8YZaobIjIAzl5n7zTX5d6EDHdOYEvo

    If the shared link does not resolve to something that you have intentionally shared from Immich, it will return a 404.

    if Immich is updated with changes that proxy doesn’t have yet, everything breaks.

    The only thing which would break it is if Immich changed the format of a few select API endpoints. And if that ever happens it’s a very easy fix.

    • just_another_person@lemmy.worldEnglish
      53·
      10 days ago

      Or you could similar just block those routes in whatever reverse proxy you’d use out in front of the server?

      I don’t run Immich myself, but just trying to understand the technical issues and this particular solution. Seems like they should have a public facing /shared route that doesn’t require access to any others, so I see your point.

      • alanOPEnglish
        111·
        10 days ago

        Or you could similar just block those routes in whatever reverse proxy you’d use out in front of the server?

        You can’t. You need to allow public access to your Immich instance’s /api/ path to use Immich’s built-in sharing.