Speed of development: Having it independent make it faster to develop without worrying much about the timelines of immich to roll out features
Depth of feature: Most of the features in this tool is often a pro feature which most of the users wont need expect the ones who was more power and control over their data.
Building it for me and sharing to the world: The tools and the features I’m building here are primarily focused on what I needed for my photo library, and major of it was common with others, that’s the reason I open sourced it and looks like a lot of people getting benefits out of it (~200k downloads already)
Also, I’m very careful making any changes to the db or assets, so I purely use immich’s API for any write and only use direct db for reads.