Google Photos is convenient until the storage fills up, the subscription rises, or you start wondering who else can see your pictures. Immich is the self-hosted answer: an open-source photo and video manager with automatic mobile backup, face recognition, albums, shared libraries, and a timeline that feels like the app it replaces. It runs on your own server, your photos never leave your hardware, and the software itself costs nothing.

The requirements are modest. Immich runs as a set of Docker containers, and a machine with 2 CPU cores, 4 GB of RAM, and enough disk for your photo library is enough for a household. The official install is a single Docker Compose file that starts the server, the database, the machine-learning service for face recognition, and Redis. On a small VPS or an old mini PC, the first install takes about thirty minutes, most of it spent downloading images.

Storage is the real planning question. A phone that backs up 10 GB of photos a month will fill a 500 GB drive in four years, so plan for growth from the start. External USB drives work for a home server, and a cheap block storage volume works for a VPS. Immich stores originals plus generated thumbnails and previews, so budget roughly 30 percent extra beyond the size of your photo library. Backups matter more than the install: a photo library with no backup is one disk failure from gone, so sync the library folder to a second drive or an object storage bucket on a schedule.

The mobile experience is what decides whether Immich sticks. The official app backs up photos and videos automatically, including in the background, and it supports the same timeline, search, and album features as the web interface. Face recognition runs locally through the machine-learning container, so no photo is sent to a third party for processing. Shared albums and partner sharing cover the family use case, and the map view plots photos by location if your images carry GPS data.

There are tradeoffs to accept. Immich is under active development, which means updates are frequent and occasionally break things, so read the release notes before upgrading and keep a backup of the database. There is no official hosted version, so you own uptime, security, and updates yourself. Put the server behind HTTPS with a reverse proxy, keep it updated monthly, and do not expose the database port to the internet.

For most households, Immich replaces a $2 to $10 monthly photo subscription with a one-time hardware cost and a few minutes of maintenance a month. It is not the right choice for someone who wants zero administration, but for anyone who already runs a small server, it is one of the highest-value self-hosted apps available. Your photos stay yours, your bill stays zero, and the only subscription is the electricity.

Migrating an existing photo library into Immich is the step most people worry about, and it is simpler than it looks. Copy your photos into the library folder and Immich scans and imports them, preserving folder structure as albums if you ask it to. Google Takeout exports can be imported the same way, though the JSON sidecar files that carry album data need a small community script to convert. Do the migration in batches, check the first hundred photos before importing the rest, and keep the original export until you have confirmed every photo arrived with its date intact.