Immich
Your phone photos, backed up to a server you own, with the features the cloud services charge for.
What it is
Immich is a self-hosted photo and video library that behaves like the cloud service on your phone. The mobile app uploads new camera roll items in the background, and the web interface gives you the timeline, albums, search and map view you would otherwise be paying a subscription for.
It runs as a Docker Compose stack: an application server, a machine learning container, PostgreSQL with the vector extension, and Redis. Face detection, object recognition and semantic search are done locally by the bundled model, so nothing is sent to a third party. The trade-off is that you are now the one running a database with a machine learning service attached to it.
It is the natural landing place for anyone leaving Google Photos or iCloud who still wants an app that works, and who has a NAS, an old PC or a small VPS with enough disk to hold the library.
Why we recommend it
It replaces a subscription, not just a folder
Immich gives you the app experience that makes cloud photo services worth paying for: background upload, timeline scrubbing, shared albums. Self-hosting it costs you disk and electricity instead of a monthly fee.
The AI features run on your own hardware
Face grouping, object search and semantic search are handled by a local model. No photo library is uploaded to a company, and there is no per-image API bill that grows with the library.
The phone app is a real app
Background backup on both iOS and Android, with options to upload only over Wi-Fi and to keep certain albums off the server. This is the part most self-hosted photo tools get wrong, and it is why Immich displaced them.
Development moves quickly
Releases are frequent and breaking changes are documented in the release notes. Read them before updating. That is the tax on a project moving this fast.
How it scores
These are our editorial ratings, not benchmark results. We score on how the project behaves in practice — how long it takes to get running, how good the documentation is, how responsive the maintainers are, and how well it holds up over time. The licence and star count above are read from GitHub and are a snapshot.
Pros and cons
Strengths
- Background backup from iOS and Android, the feature that makes it a genuine replacement
- Face, object and semantic search all run locally on your own hardware
- Clean web UI with timeline, albums, sharing, map and favourites
- Very active project with frequent releases and a large community
- Supports hardware transcoding and external libraries, so existing folders are not locked out
Trade-offs
- The full stack is several containers including PostgreSQL and a machine learning service, which is more machinery than many people want to babysit
- Machine learning, especially face detection, wants a real CPU or a GPU and a decent amount of RAM
- You own the backup of the backup: a disk failure takes the library with it unless you configure a second copy
- Licensed AGPL 3.0, which is fine for personal use but carries copyleft obligations if you fork it into a commercial product
How to get it
Direct download
Clicking a button downloads the file straight from the project's release — you stay on this page.
One-line install
Prefer the terminal? Copy a command and you are done.
mkdir ./immich-app && cd ./immich-app && wget -O docker-compose.yml https://github.com/immich-app/immich/releases/latest/download/docker-compose.yml && wget -O .env https://github.com/immich-app/immich/releases/latest/download/example.env && docker compose up -d
Source and documentation
At a glance
| Category | Self-hosted |
|---|---|
| Licence | AGPL 3.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript |
| GitHub stars | 113,738 |
| Repository | immich-app/immich |
Licence and star count were read from the GitHub API when this page was generated and are a snapshot. Check the repository for the current figure and the authoritative licence text.
Other Self-hosted tools
We are not affiliated with Immich or its maintainers. We list it because it is genuinely useful and genuinely free. If you plan to build a commercial product on top of it, read the licence on the repository first.