I finally bit the bullet and deployed image this past weekend, it took a few tries and I would suggest to start simple with your first one, you don't need a complex raid system to just test out copying your photos into it.

As others have mentioned, if you are truly self hosting image you will have multiple copies of your photos and other locations as well, anyways.

But once you actually get the settings dialed in I was shocked at how effective the facial recognition and tagging was, and even more shocked at just how much the whole interface looked like Google photos. Like, the whole design language is shared across both of their uis as best I can tell.

And Google photos is what I had moved off of back in the start of this year, so it felt like coming home for me.

Also worth mention just because folks don't always think about it at the start, for anyone that has an interest in keeping all of SFW and NSFW content completely separated, I just loaded a second instance of Immich pointing to a different port, in my Portainer deployment, and have two fully functional collections on the same box.