Immich Has a Free Self-Hosted Google Photos Alternative

Immich is a free, open-source photo and video management platform. It looks and feels like Google Photos but runs on your own server.

What Is Immich?

Immich is a high-performance self-hosted photo and video backup solution with a mobile app that rivals Google Photos.

Key features:

• Mobile app (iOS and Android) with auto-backup
• Face recognition and clustering
• Reverse geocoding (location on map)
• Smart search (search by content, objects, scenes)
• Shared albums and libraries
• Timeline view
• Video support (including live photos)
• RAW file support
• EXIF data viewer
• Multi-user support
• External library scanning
• Machine learning powered

Quick Start

mkdir immich && cd immich
curl -o docker-compose.yml https://raw.githubusercontent.com/immich-app/immich/main/docker/docker-compose.yml
curl -o .env https://raw.githubusercontent.com/immich-app/immich/main/docker/.env.example

# Edit .env with your settings
docker compose up -d

Open http://your-server:2283. Create account. Install the mobile app.

Mobile App

The Immich mobile app supports:

• Automatic photo/video backup
• Background upload
• Multi-server support
• Offline viewing
• Share to Immich from any app

Available on iOS App Store and Google Play.

AI Features

• Smart search: Search "dog on beach" and find matching photos
• Face recognition: Auto-groups photos by person
• Object detection: Finds cars, buildings, food, etc.
• CLIP embeddings: Semantic search across your library

All AI processing happens on YOUR server. No cloud.

Immich vs Google Photos

Feature	Google Photos	Immich
Storage	15GB free	Unlimited (your storage)
Cost	$3-10/month	$0
Privacy	Google scans photos	100% private
AI search	Yes	Yes
Face recognition	Yes	Yes
RAW support	Limited	Full
Video	Yes	Yes
Sharing	Yes	Yes
Self-hosted	No	Yes

Hardware Requirements

• Minimum: 4GB RAM, 2 CPU cores
• Recommended: 8GB RAM, 4 CPU cores
• Storage: Depends on library (1TB+ recommended)

Works great on a NAS (Synology, Unraid, TrueNAS) or any Linux server.

With 56K+ GitHub stars. Your photos, your server.

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