What is Immich?

Immich is arguably the best self-hostable photo and video management solution accessible to technology enthusiasts and many everyday consumers alike. As the project maintainers describe it:

Easily back up, organize, and manage your photos on your own server. Immich helps you browse, search and organize your photos and videos with ease, without sacrificing your privacy.

Surpassing 113,000 GitHub stars as of August 2026, the project has drawn significant attention for being a free and source-available platform matching the user-friendly interface, quality, and core features of Big Tech offerings like Google Photos without subscription fees or data mining.

Alex Tran started Immich in February 2022 as a personal project for his family. Since May 2024, the project joined the FUTO organization, enabling the core team to work on Immich full-time.

How Big Tech Options Hurt You

Your Uploads are Scanned with AI and Sent to Law Enforcement

During the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, almost everyone was adjusting to staying indoors all day and moving social interactions to technology platforms. As reported by the New York Times, a father noticed unusual swelling in his toddler’s groin area, and due to the lockdown, the pediatrician’s office requested that he take photos of the area to submit before a telehealth appointment. The photos taken on the phone were automatically backed up to Google Photos, and Google’s automated artificial intelligence, programmed to scan for Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), instantly flagged the medical images.

Google’s system reported the photos to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), which forwarded the case to the San Francisco Police Department. Detectives launched a 10-month investigation. Law enforcement ultimately cleared the father of any criminal wrongdoing, recognizing that the photos were entirely innocent and purely for medical diagnostic purposes. Nevertheless, his Google account was permanently locked, effectively deleting all Google service data, including photos, contacts, and emails. While stopping CSAM is important, innocent people, such as a parent following the directions of a doctor’s office, can find their lives upended and their digital memories permanently wiped.

Your Uploads are Probably Used as AI Training Data

Google states it does not use the personal data or images stored in your Google Photos library to train external or general-purpose AI models, such as Gemini products outside of Photos. However, terms of service and privacy policies can change on a whim, and with closed-source cloud providers, you have no real way to verify what happens to your data behind closed doors.

No More “Unlimited” Free Storage

Before June 2021, Google Photos offered completely free unlimited storage for high-quality photos. The deal enticed millions to switch to Google’s service, effectively locking them into Google’s ecosystem. Since June 2021, users have had to budget their 15 gigabytes of free storage or pay for a Google One subscription for additional uploads that started to count toward their budget.

Martin’s Favorite Immich Features

Instead of an exhaustive list of features, I will briefly explain how I use Immich. There are other useful features that you can learn about by visiting the official Immich documentation.

Simple Timeline

It is genuinely fun to scroll through your life. Here are some photos I took with classmates while we explored Chicago’s Chinatown together. Note: The random guy on the roof was not a part of our group.

Maps

View where your photos and videos were taken using the maps feature, assuming the media is geotagged. Moving the map to Rochester, Minnesota reminds me of the fun events my parents took me to while they went to the globally regarded Mayo Clinic hospital.

Facial Tagging

While you can manually tag faces, I never have because the automatic tagging works well. Here’s me in a radio/podcast studio being interviewed at my university.

Versatile Search

Immich runs lightweight local machine-learning models, including CLIP for semantic search and Optical Character Recognition for text detection, for its smart features. This enables the search feature to work well with natural language prompts. In the following example, I queried about Minecraft and it ranked the relatedness of all the photos and videos in my media library.

Easy Import

You can upload one or more files at once through the web interface, mobile app, and command-line tool.

Prior to Immich, I saved my memories to my self-hosted Nextcloud instance (a file storage platform). Prior to Nextcloud, all my media was on Google Photos. I used Google’s Takeout website to export my data. After creating a takeout request, if the email option is selected, Google sends you an email with temporary download links of all your media. Google Takeout notoriously separates your photo metadata into messy .json files. The Immich CLI automatically pairs this metadata back to your original photos during import, saving hours of manual fixing. If you have media in Google Photos or another provider, simply follow the same steps so the content is downloaded to your local device for upload to Immich.

The Immich CLI tool has an option for handling Google Takeout files. In my case, there is just one directory of files to upload. Uploads are automatically deduplicated via checksum hashing, preventing accidental duplicate uploads.

The Caveat: Handling Your Data with Care

You are responsible for your data when you self-host any service. With data as precious as your photo and video memories, it is worth employing a tried and true back up strategy used by individuals and large companies, the 3-2-1 Backup Rule.

The rule advises that people keep three copies of their data on two different media types with one copy off-site.

• Three copies: One is the “original” data, which in this case is the file system directory where Immich stores your uploads. The second and third are copies of that directory.
• Two different media types: A media type includes local storage, cloud storage, and so forth.
• One copy off-site: One copy should exist in a remote location, away from the others. The distance helps protect against natural and physical disasters, such as a fire.

How I Follow the Rule

I host Immich on the same dedicated Linux server that runs this website. This server, hosted in Canada, is where the production copy of my memories exist. I back up the Immich directory to my laptop and an external SSD (located in the United States) using rsync. The directory contains both the original media files, sidecar files with edits (Immich never modifies original files), and its PostgreSQL database storing users, face tagging, and other back-end information.

Example Rsync Script

rsync -avzP --delete -e "ssh -c aes128-gcm@openssh.com" user@libregalaxy.org:/home/user/immich/library/backups /home/martin/Backups/immich

Note: Please be very careful with the --delete flag; ensure you don’t accidentally reverse the source and destination paths! Feel free to remove the delete flag from your command or script until you are sure you have it right.

The Next Step: Try it Yourself

• Immich Official Website

• Immich Official Demo Website

• Immich App Download

• Immich Server Installation Guide

• Immich Source Code

Before Your Self-Host

If you are completely new to self-hosting, please set up the fundamentals first to get your grounding. I find it most beneficial to start with a reverse proxy service that will help securely expose your other services to the internet when properly configured. Nginx Proxy Manager is great for beginners, while Traefik is great for more advanced users.