Immich

What is Immich?

Immich is a self-hosted photo and video management app you run on your own server. Its mobile apps automatically back up the photos and videos on your phone — the way Google Photos does — and its web and mobile interface lets you browse, organize, and search that library while every file stays on hardware you control.

What is Immich best for?

Immich is best for people leaving Google Photos or iCloud who want automatic phone backup without a monthly storage bill or a cloud provider scanning their library. It fits home-lab owners, families, and photographers who already run a server (or a NAS) and want a polished, app-first way to keep years of photos private and searchable.

What can Immich do?

• Auto-back up your camera roll from native iOS and Android apps, in the background
• Organize photos into albums, shared albums, and partner sharing between users
• Search by people, objects, and scenes, plus CLIP-powered semantic search (“photos of a red car”)
• Recognize and cluster faces automatically so you can browse by person
• Support multi-user accounts, each with their own library and quotas
• Read RAW files, EXIF metadata, and place photos on a map by location
• Surface “memories” from past years and share individual photos or albums by public link
• Add external libraries so Immich can index existing folders without moving your files

Where does Immich fall short?

• It is not a backup solution on its own. The project itself tells you to keep a 3-2-1 backup of your originals — Immich manages and displays your library, but if your server or disk fails and it holds the only copy, those photos are gone.
• The machine-learning features need real memory. Face recognition and smart search push the recommended RAM to 6–8GB; on a 4GB box you have to disable machine learning and lose those features.
• In-app editing is minimal. Compared with Google Photos, Immich offers only basic adjustments, so you’ll still reach for a separate editor for anything beyond crops and small tweaks.

Is Immich free?

Yes — Immich is free and open source under the AGPL-3.0 license, with no paid tier and no features locked behind a paywall. You only pay for the server it runs on. The project sells optional lifetime licenses purely to support development — $24.99 for an individual or $99.99 for a whole server — but they unlock nothing; the software is fully functional without them.

What does Immich replace?

Immich is a self-hosted Google Photos alternative. It covers the same core job — automatic phone backup, albums, face recognition, and search — but keeps your photos on your own storage instead of Google’s cloud, with no subscription for space. Nextcloud with its Photos app is a more general-purpose option, though Immich’s mobile apps and search are more focused on photos specifically.

FAQ

Is Immich open source? Yes. Immich is licensed under AGPL-3.0, and its full source is public on GitHub. The optional paid licenses are donations to fund development, not a closed “pro” edition.

Can I self-host Immich for free? Yes. Self-hosting is free; you provide a Linux server with Docker and pay only for that hardware. A minimum of about 6GB RAM is recommended if you want the machine-learning search and face features.

Is Immich a good Google Photos alternative? For most people, yes — it matches the auto-backup, albums, face grouping, and search that make Google Photos convenient, while keeping everything private. The trade-off is that you run and back up the server yourself.

Is Immich stable enough to trust with my photos? Immich reached its stable v2.0 release in October 2025 and now follows semantic versioning, so it is far more predictable than in its early days. Even so, treat it as your viewer, not your only copy, and keep independent backups of your originals.