Back in the day, Google Photos used to be my primary tool for managing images and backing them up to a cloud server. But once I’d grown accustomed to hosting containerized services on local machines, I started to notice some deal-breaking issues. For one, storing images on online platforms, especially those owned by large corporations, isn’t ideal from a privacy standpoint. Plus, Google’s free 15GB storage plan isn’t enough to house all the screenshots, images, and videos my family has captured over the last decade.

Fortunately, some storage space and a little bit of curiosity were all I needed to self-host my own Google Photos replacement. After cycling between different local image managers, I’ve settled on Immich, as this FOSS app includes a plethora of facilities to organize my family’s photo and video collection.

The Google Photos-like interface makes Immich a lot more accessible

And its mobile app is just as reliable

Having spent the majority of my teenage years and uni days tinkering with everything from Linux CLI tools to FreeBSD packages, I usually don’t have much trouble getting accustomed to new interfaces when switching applications. Unfortunately, that’s not something I can say for the rest of my family, especially when the new service in question is a self-hosted FOSS utility.

Now, I’ve got nothing but respect for developers who put tools comparable to premium apps for free. But the UI elements on many FOSS applications have steeper learning curves compared to the simplified interfaces on cloud tools – even more so when you consider that my folks have been using Google apps for well over a decade. It’s the same problem I encountered when I switched from Plex to Jellyfin, and it took my family a few days to get used to the latter’s UI.

Immich, however, is a breath of fresh air compared to most self-hosted utilities, as its interface is pretty similar to that of Google Photos. I often use the web UI for managing my images, but it also has a handy mobile application that can directly sync media to the server running on my NAS. This provides a no-nonsense process for backing up data to our Immich server, and I’ve already configured the Immich apps on everyone’s phones to automatically sync images to the container over a Wi-Fi connection.

Immich also includes the same chronological timelines, albums, and detailed search features you’ll find on its Google counterpart, and their positions on the mobile UI are largely identical. Better yet, Immich lets me generate custom URLs to share my photos with other users, and it can even detect faces in images. In some rare cases, Immich’s facial detection facility can result in false positives, where the app manages to find faces in inanimate objects. But for the most part, it works the way I want it to. Then there’s the time-based memories facility, which generates short albums of all the images we’d captured on a specific day, akin to the "This Day X Years Ago” feature on Google Photos.

The extensive image management features are pretty handy, too

Although Immich’s simplified interface and automatic backups are a godsend for my non-technically inclined folks, I’m the one managing the more complex aspects of my self-hosted app collection. And thankfully, it includes plenty of tools to help me do just that. For example, Immich can pull metadata for images, and I’m free to edit these values. It also supports tags and reverse geocoding, which makes organizing photos a lot easier. There’s even a dedicated utility that marks similar-looking images as duplicates, but instead of automatically clearing them, it asks for my approval first. Since I’m the one making the decision, I don't have to worry about the app randomly deleting distinct photos that it mistakenly identified as duplicates. Managing users is just as simple, as I can assign different permissions to my folks. That way, I can ensure their data gets synced to the server, while also restricting enough privileges to avoid accidental deletions.

Immich is also available on practically every home lab platform

Just make sure you allocate enough storage for your photo collection

I’ve cycled between different NAS distros, virtualization platforms, and container-hosting tools over the course of my home lab journey, and I love how Immich is available on pretty much all of them. For example, I’m running Immich directly on TrueNAS, but I’ve also deployed it on Proxmox instances in the past. The former includes a built-in container app that lets me select everything from the dataset housing my images to the GPU powering the enhanced face recognition facility. But I’ve also found Immich app templates on Unraid, Cosmos Cloud, CasaOS, Runtipi, and everything in between.

That said, I’d recommend creating proper backup schedules for your Immich data. After all, when you’re self-hosting thousands of images locally, the last thing you’d want is to lose them in a freak accident. Me? I’ve synced the host path of my Immich container with a remote TrueNAS node for maximum safety, with Tailscale acting as the bridge between my primary and remote storage servers.

All that’s left is a built-in image editor

Otherwise, Immich is the perfect Google Photos alternative

If I had to add one gripe about Immich, I’d point to the lack of a proper image editing tool. And I’m not even asking for the AI-centric features on Google Photos. I just want a way to make quick adjustments, like cropping images and modifying their color attributes from Immich’s web UI. That way, I won’t have to download an image, manually make these adjustments on Darktable, and then reupload them to the Immich container. Fortunately, a built-in editor is a part of Immich’s roadmap, so we’re probably going to see it sooner or later.

But aside from this issue, I have to admit that Immich is better than Google Photos if you’re even remotely into self-hosted tools. After all, I can allocate terabytes of space to my personal photo cloud without getting bled by subscription fees or worrying about Google gaining access to my private images. Plus, its simple UI and quality-of-life features make it just as handy for my family members.