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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 21st, 2023

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  • Hey I understood what you meant. The result that you are trying to achieve is very close to the browser caching normally present is what I meant. When you zoom in it will only load that area. And I don’t think you can specify the number of tiles to be a specific number, since the zoom levels are not linear.

    The offline leaflet I shared in the previous comment actually does the same thing you want to achieve. The difference is the offline mode is discarded immediately when the system is back online. So that library could be modified to incorporate the time dependency and users visiting a point again I specified in the last comment, at least in theory.

    Regarding OSM data, there are zip files available for downloading. Geofabrik and openstreetmap.fr are examples. Another tool is Protomaps, where you can download by drawing a polygon. But these are not going to be the ideal solution for a product like Immich.

    By the way I saw your update. Great job on following up and providing a fix for others. I really really appreciate it.


  • If you are asking about vector maps, I am not really sure, because I have no experience with it. So can’t really comment on that. On raster maps, as you already know every tile is a PNG. The behaviour you described is very similar to the client side caching that usually happens in the browser. Depending on the coordinates in the viewport and zoom level the server provides the tiles.

    Usually to save the map most offline map making tools will ask you to draw a rectangle and select the required zoom levels. In an interactive map, the rectangle is the viewport of the device. So there can be a feature which will download and store the tiles around a specific gps location for a fixed geographical area. That should be doable without much issue. But in this case that may not be a good idea.

    If you visualise all zoom levels stacked over each other, the images need to be retrieved when the user zooms into a point the geographical area will not stay the same. Smaller geographical area is only needed with higher zoom levels. If we only take all the tiles that get downloaded in every layer, it may produce a shape similar to an inverted pyramid. So saving the images as a user zooms in for the first time, may be the best idea.

    Then the saved tiles need to be used again when users zoom in the same area. Also these tiles need not be updated frequently and maybe even once in every 3 months might be enough, that too only when the user zooms in again in that area.

    This can be a little tricky as almost all the tools that create offline maps do it for a fixed area and selected zoom levels, every point in that area gets equal priority. But in this case the point is the important element. The area nearby may not be relevant at all. So that is the part that needs some exploration.


  • I read through your comments and the reply from devs regarding OSM. I will add a few points that can be part of the feature request. I have some experience dealing with maps, and my understanding is you can set up an offline version of OSM, which will get updated only when required.

    leaflet.offline is a library which provides a similar functionality. I think with some modifications this can be implemented to significantly reduce the load on OSM that using it directly.

    Even with a very large zoom level say 11 to 15, a large area of maps takes like a few hundred MBs. We once cached the entire region of California with all the details and it was around 240 MB IIRC. But Immich does not need this much details and it is possible to restrict zoom levels to certain details.

    For someone self hosting several hundreds of GBs of photos, this should be doable without using too much storage. I think the problem will be that this is a huge engineering effort. Depending on the priority of the feature it may not be easy to do this.

    There is a site called Switch2OSM which details almost everything you need to know. The previous link is on how to serve map tiles on your own. Again it is a daunting task and not suitable for everyone.

    If anyone needs a live update of OSM as things get added, look into the commercial offerings.

    In conclusion, it is possible to include a highly optimised version of OSM, instead of putting their servers under heavy load. The catch is, it is not easy and will need a huge engineering effort. I think developers should take a call on this.


  • So many people freaked out by privacy scandals, that made it a billion worth business. first with a massive amount of VPN services, some of them even from the same company and giving them different brands, browsers everywhere with same situation , then self hosting which it seems multiple developers are putting the eye on it as some fresh juice . And FUTO eyes specially

    Can you elaborate this a bit more? Are the first few points about Proton, or in general? And I guess in the case of browsers you meant Chromium. Also I’m not really sure about what you meant regarding self hosting.





  • I actually use Nginx. The major advantage is if you have to access something directly. For example a client app in your device wants to access a service you host. In that case Heimdall won’t be enough. You can still use ip with port, but I prefer subdomains. I use Nginx Proxy Manager to manage everything.

    Regarding the network going down, the proprietary part of the tailscale is the coordination server. There is an open source implementation of the same, called headscale. If you are okay with managing your own thing, this is an alternative. Obviously the convenience will be affected.

    Apart from that, if you haven’t already read this blog post on How tailscale works? I highly recommend reading this. It gives a really good introduction to the infrastructure. Summary is your connections are P2P, using wireguard. I don’t think tailscale will have a failure scenario that easily.

    I hope this helps.