I won’t place a 7th generation Intel CPU as slow and outdated. You may be surprised to learn I have multiple Intel Atom 230/330 CPUs that serve my personal needs very well. It’s extremely slow CPU, yet it’s surprisingly capable for a home server setup.

To give you some context: a 4K JPEG image is converted to AVIF within 30 seconds on my i7-4770 desktop, while said Intel Atom processor does the same job within 30 minutes! I don’t expect Immich to run all the processing on such machine, obviously. But that would be cool to host a web site with the archives on said hardware (it’s plenty capable to run a simple web server, especially for just one user / or a family).

Also, I don’t understand the scale model. I’d rather make a reverse proxy and a bunch of old computers like that, so when I need to access a photo from, say, 2010, it would wake on LAN start the associated computer, instead of me needing to have a super beefy computer with 20 TB disks that does everything. That’s why I think the architecture does not have the scaling in mind, or it’s not obvious / trivial.

My current Immich server is the MacBook Pro from 2011, mobile i5 something (3rd generation I believe). It’s OK, when things are processed. But I’d prefer to offload it to ultra-low-powered machines for scale and power efficiency. Again: perhaps that’s possible already, I haven’t investigated it thoroughly yet.