Immich: the self-hosted Google Photos alternative on the rise

Between Google Photos' shrinking free storage and the iCloud lock-in, demand for private photo backup has never been higher. Immich has become the most discussed answer to that.

What Immich gets right

• Automatic import from a phone (dedicated mobile app), just like Google Photos.
• Face recognition and object/location search, computed locally — your photos never leave for a third-party service to be indexed.
• Album sharing across multiple user accounts, handy for families.

What it needs infrastructure-wise

Immich runs as Docker Compose (app + Postgres + Redis + a machine-learning microservice for image recognition). The main thing to watch: the ML microservice can eat a lot of CPU/RAM on the first import of a large library — plan for a VPS with at least 4GB of RAM if you're indexing tens of thousands of photos.

Why now

Immich went from a nascent project to one of the most-discussed self-hosted apps in a matter of months, driven by a very fast release cadence and an already mature mobile app. It's now the default recommendation on most self-hosting forums, ahead of PhotoPrism and LibrePhotos.