Google Photos → Immich
What it saves, what actually moves, what you rebuild — and the thing that catches people.
What it costs, and what it saves
Google One 2TB is about $10/month. Immich on a home server or VPS with equivalent storage is $5–15, and the storage is yours permanently.
Moves cleanly
Photos and videos via Google Takeout, including metadata if you use the immich-go tool to reattach it.
You rebuild
Albums and any sharing.
What Google Photos costs you today
15 GB free, shared across Google Photos, Drive, and Gmail; beyond that a Google One plan is required, starting at $1.99/month for 100 GB, $2.99/month for 200 GB, and $9.99/month for 2 TB.
What actually holds you in
Photos live in Google's cloud tied to your account and share one quota with Drive and Gmail. Google Takeout can export your library, but large exports come in multiple archives, some metadata (such as descriptions and album structure) lands in separate JSON sidecar files rather than embedded in the images, and re-importing elsewhere can take effort.
What you are moving to
Immich is an open-source, self-hosted photo and video platform built specifically as a Google Photos-style experience you run yourself. Its mobile apps back up your camera roll automatically in the background, and the web app offers timeline browsing, albums, sharing, map view, and on-device-style machine learning for face grouping and object/text search. Your photos are stored as ordinary files on your own server, so you keep full ownership; the trade-off is that you operate the stack (server, database, and backups) yourself.
Free and open-source (self-host); you provide the hardware and storage
Immich strengths
- Closest Google Photos-like experience among the open options
- Automatic background camera-roll backup on iOS and Android
- Fully open-source (AGPL-3.0), backed by FUTO
- Photos stored as normal files on hardware you own
- Very active development and a large community
What you give up
- You run and back up the server, database, and storage
- Fast release pace means occasional breaking changes to watch for on upgrade
- Machine-learning features (face/object search) want a few GB of RAM to run smoothly
- No hosted option — self-hosting is the only path
The migration, step by step
- 1Request Google Takeout early — for a large library this takes days to prepare
- 2Deploy Immich with docker compose and plan storage for the full library plus thumbnails
- 3Import with immich-go rather than the web uploader, because it reattaches the JSON metadata Takeout separates out
- 4Verify dates and locations survived — this is what Takeout mangles
- 5Install mobile apps and enable backup before deleting anything from Google
The gotcha
Google Takeout separates metadata into sidecar JSON files. Importing photos without reattaching them loses every date and location, and the library becomes an undated pile. immich-go exists for exactly this and skipping it is the single most common mistake.
When to stay on Google Photos
You want zero operational responsibility for irreplaceable family photos — this is a migration where a mistake is permanent.
More Layer 5 migrations
Figures verified 2026-07-05 against vendor pricing pages. Prices change and migrations differ by estate — treat the cost delta as a starting model, not a quote. Rankings and recommendations here are merit-only; affiliate income never changes a verdict. See our methodology.