Immich requires to be run on a server to function, but a lot of (or even all) of its functions are things that could reasonably done entirely on-device. Aves combined with some automatic backup solution such as Nextcloud gets (from what I can tell) most of the functionality Immich offers.
How would you backup Immich on device?
And if you backup to Nextcloud than you already have a served?
So you are arguing that having a file server is enough? And processing is done on client side?
That would be in this case very inefficient.
- You would need to have all the data on the Client or transfer all the data to the client once you load it.
- You device has to do all the processing which would lead to lower battery life.
- How do you handle multiple Users? Giving partially access to the Filesystem?
I could come up with other points but this should give you an idea. Yes, for some use cases a server-client approach does not make sense but for a dedicated photo backup and indexer it absolutely does.
Then swap you nameservers to a DNS provider that allows that?