Out of Memory

Inspiration Families take more photos every year, so cloud storage keeps costing more — and you never actually own any of it. We wanted families to keep a lifetime of memories private, searchable, and fully their own, without an endless subscription.

What it does Nebula Photos turns a small, low-power computer into a private photo & video cloud for the whole family. Every phone auto-backs-up in the background, and on-device AI gives face recognition and natural-language search ("kids at the lake") — all working even with no internet.

How we built it We built it on Immich (open-source, self-hosted) running in Docker on an ARM single-board computer, with PostgreSQL + pgvector powering on-device ML search. A set of systemd services makes it appliance-grade: a watchdog and auto-recovery, hourly database backups, safe auto-updates with rollback, Caddy for local HTTPS, and Tailscale for optional remote access — all set up by a one-command factory script.

Challenges we faced Making a full photo + ML stack run reliably on tiny 2 GB ARM hardware: tuning memory, surviving power cuts and storage hiccups, and keeping setup simple enough for a non-technical family.

What we learned How much of "the cloud" you can genuinely own and run yourself — and how careful resource tuning and self-healing services turn a hobby board into a dependable appliance.

What's next Easier onboarding, multi-box family sharing, and a packaged plug-and-play kit.

Built With

• armbian
• caddy
• docker
• immich
• pgvector
• postgresql
• redis
• tailscale