Immich
Top pickA self-hosted photo and video backup that feels like Google Photos.
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.
What it does well
- +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
Where it falls short
- −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
Hardware note
Runs on a mini-PC, NAS, or Raspberry Pi 4/5, but the face-recognition and search features are happier with 4 GB+ of RAM; storage scales with the size of your library.
Immich as an alternative to
Where Immich shows up in our comparisons, and how it ranked.
Immich head-to-head
Straight comparisons against the tools people weigh it against.