Immich: The Self-Hosted Google Photos Alternative That Keeps Your Photos Yours

Google Photos is convenient, but it comes with strings attached: your library lives on someone else's servers, your free storage runs out, and a subscription becomes the price of keeping your memories. Immich is the open-source answer - a self-hosted photo and video platform that gives you the same convenience while keeping every byte on hardware you control.

What Immich is

Immich is a high-performance, self-hosted photo and video management solution, frequently described as an open-source Google Photos alternative. It is free and fully open source under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0, and it has grown into one of the most active projects on GitHub, with roughly 113,000 stars and more than 6,800 forks.

The project began in February 2022 and reached a stable 2.0.0 release in October 2025. Development has not slowed since: the team shipped v3.0.0 in July 2026 with mobile editing, workflow automation, and integrity checks, and the current release line sits at v3.2.x, with v3.2.2 landing in September 2026.

Why it matters for self-hosting

Immich's real draw is that it reproduces the Google Photos experience without the cloud. Install the mobile app on iOS or Android, point it at your server, and it backs up new photos and videos automatically in the background - the same set-and-forget convenience, minus the subscription and the third-party processing of your memories.

The feature set is genuinely close to the original. Facial recognition clusters photos by person using locally run models, and a CLIP-based machine-learning service powers natural-language search, so you can type "dog at the beach" and find the shot without tagging a single photo. There is also object and scene detection, a map view built from GPS data, a familiar timeline view, shared albums for families, multi-user accounts on one server, duplicate detection, and support for external libraries and RAW and Live Photo files.

How it differs from cloud services

The differences come down to ownership. With Immich there is no subscription tier and no feature paywall - every capability, including AI face recognition and semantic search, is free under the AGPL license. Your photos sit on your own storage, and the machine-learning container runs inside your deployment by default, so photo analysis, face embeddings, and search processing never leave infrastructure you control. The trade-off is responsibility: Immich is not a backup, and the team is explicit that a 3-2-1 strategy - three copies on two kinds of media, one off-site - is still essential.

The project's current state

Immich is backed by FUTO, an Austin-based company that funds open-source software, which pays the core team to work on it full-time while keeping the AGPL license and promising no paywalled features, ads, or data mining. The funding model is a deliberate experiment in sustainable open-source consumer software, and the project's rapid release cadence and large contributor base suggest it is working.

Getting started

The standard deployment is a Docker Compose stack with four services: the Immich server and web UI on port 2283, a separate machine-learning container, Redis for the job queue, and PostgreSQL. The official requirements call for at least 6 GB of RAM (8 GB recommended) and two CPU cores, with the database on local SSD. The machine-learning container is optional - disable it and you lose search and face recognition but keep the core backup and timeline features - and if you have an NVIDIA GPU you can run a CUDA build to speed up the initial indexing of a large library dramatically.

Immich is proof that a self-hosted photo library can feel as polished as a commercial product. If you are ready to take control of your photos, it is the strongest open-source option available.