Over the past year I’ve been using Immich as a replacement for Google Photos. This all started when Google began limiting the amount of free storage. After years and several different phones, I’ve amassed tens of thousands of images and videos.
One of the great things about Google Photos is the ability to automatically upload your images. One of the bad things about Google Photos is also the ability to automatically upload your images. I can’t count the number of times I needed to take a picture of my driver’s license or insurance card to send to HR or someone else, only to see it show up in Google Photos weeks later. That part is entirely on me. And as you’ll see, this can also happen with Immich.
The biggest difference between Immich and Google Photos is that Immich is 100% selfhosted. You have to set up a server somewhere, either locally or in the cloud using a service like AWS or Google Cloud. But isn’t one of the main reasons for using Immich is to reclaim your photos and remove big tech from controlling them? You can rest assured that big tech is using private images to train their AI and churn out AI slop… and would I be able to ask Nano Banana to recreate my driver’s license? Possibly. I’m sure big tech has my privacy as one of their core principles, right? RIGHT?
To get started, I bought a cheap eight year old server off Craigslist that was being pulled out of commission at a local business. It was a fully working Lenovo with RAID capability, minus four hard drives. After spending about $150 on some cheap hard drives off eBay, I ended up with a working server and roughly 500 gigs of storage on raid mode.
Going back to Google and their new Google Photos limits, I started searching for alternative providers. At first I assumed I could just copy everything over to some new free service, but nothing viable came up. What I did keep seeing were people talking about self hosting their own Google Photos clone using a system called Immich.
I was initially skeptical that it would have the same level of functionality, but I was pleasantly surprised after installing it. I set it up using Docker and run it entirely in containers. After uploading around 100 images, I realized it is basically a perfect clone of Google Photos, and in some ways even better.
Like Google Photos, Immich supports facial recognition, image searching, and video embedding, with the added benefit that everything is fully under your control. OCR is one of the newest features added in version 2.4.1.
Immich development is moving fast. Features are added regularly, bugs get fixed quickly, and the community around it is extremely active. It is open source and you can see exactly what is being worked on and even request features LIKE ORDER IMAGES BY UPLOADED DATE AND TIME. It feels less like a product you are locked into and more like a tool you actually own and control.
That ownership aspect changes how you think about your photo library. Instead of worrying about pricing changes, storage limits, and policy updates buried in a terms of service page that is 60,000 words long that I’m sure you’ve read, you can worry about on backups, redundancy, and long term preservation. Your photos stop being fodder for AI SLOP training and go back to being YOUR personal history.
