Immich is the closest thing to a self-hosted Google Photos: phone apps with auto-upload, faces, search, albums, and shared libraries — all on your storage. Unlimited storage, guaranteed until the disk says otherwise — which, notably, is not a paywall.
Why it earns the resources it uses
- Phone backup that just works. Background upload over Wi-Fi; the apps are good enough that non-technical family members don't notice the difference.
- Machine learning on your hardware. Face recognition and semantic search run on any GPU — fast, private, no cloud credits.
- Your metadata stays yours. Exif, albums, and people data live in one database you can dump and restore.
Good habits
- Back up the database separately from the upload directory — photos without the DB lose faces and albums; DB without photos is a directory of promises.
- Give the ML service a GPU if you have one. CPU-only embedding turns the first big import into a week-long job.
- Use the official backup scripts for a consistent dump + assets snapshot, and test a restore before trusting it.
- Development moves fast — read release notes and snapshot before upgrading.