Immich

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Self-hosted photo and video backup that mirrors the Google Photos experience on infrastructure you control.

What it does

Immich runs a server (plus native iOS/Android apps) that automatically backs up photos and videos from your phone, then organizes them with the kind of features people expect from a cloud photo service: a searchable timeline, albums and sharing, machine-learning face recognition, and natural-language/semantic search over your own library — all processed on your own hardware rather than a third party's.

Why people use it

• Automatic background backup from a phone app, not a manual upload workflow
• Face recognition and semantic photo search without sending images to a cloud provider
• A timeline/album UI deliberately close to Google Photos, so the switch doesn't feel like a downgrade
• Keeps a personal photo library under the owner's control instead of a vendor's

Pros

• Feature parity with commercial cloud photo services is unusually complete for a self-hosted project — timeline, albums, sharing, and ML search all work out of the box
• Native mobile apps make day-to-day backup close to automatic, not just a web-upload tool
• Fast release cadence with frequent, visible feature and bug-fix updates

Cons

• Face recognition and smart search are compute-heavy; a smooth experience benefits from a GPU or a reasonably capable server, unlike most lightweight self-hosted apps
• AGPL-3.0 licensing means a company wanting to host or resell it commercially without AGPL's copyleft obligations needs to buy a separate license from the Immich team
• Built around the mobile-backup workflow first — someone who only wants a simple web-upload photo library has lighter-weight options

Related Grove

Self-Hosted