Immich
A self hosted photo library that feels close to Google Photos
Immich backs up the photos and videos from your phone to your own server and gives you a timeline, albums, sharing, face recognition and search. It is AGPL-3.0 licensed and one of the most active projects in self hosting.
Best for when
- you want automatic phone photo backup to your own server
- you want to stop paying for cloud photo storage
- you want face and content search without sending photos to a third party
Watch out for
- it is not a backup on its own, so the library needs a separate backup
- the machine learning service is heavy on RAM and CPU, especially during the first import
- updates sometimes need manual steps, so read the release notes every time
Why people switch to it
The phone apps do automatic background backup, which is the feature that makes a photo service usable at all. On top of that come a fast timeline, a map, shared albums, face grouping and search that understands what is in a picture, all computed on your hardware.
For anyone paying every month for more cloud photo storage, it turns a subscription into a disk you already own. It is also a gentle way into multi container apps, because the official Compose file is the documented install path.
Costs you should plan for
It runs a server, a machine learning service, PostgreSQL and Redis. The machine learning part is what uses the most RAM and CPU, especially on the first import of a large library. Storage grows with every photo, and thumbnails and transcoded videos add to it.
Immich is not a backup by itself. If the server disk dies, your photos die with it, so you need a real backup of the upload folder and the database on another disk or another place. Read the release notes before updating, since breaking changes still happen.
