How to self-host Immich: a complete Google Photos replacement

Of all the "self-hosted Google Photos" projects, Immich is the one that actually earns the comparison. Install the app, turn on backup, and your phone's photos flow to a server you own — with a timeline, face recognition and search that feel like the thing you're replacing. Here's how to run it, and run it well.

What you get

• Automatic phone backup. Native iOS and Android apps back up your camera roll in the background — the feature that makes Immich a real replacement rather than a gallery.
• A fast timeline you can scrub by month and year across a huge library.
• Face recognition and smart search — find people, objects, even text in images.
• Albums, shared links and multi-user accounts for the whole household.

What Immich needs (size it right)

This is the part worth getting right up front, because it's where a self-hosted Immich goes from "amazing" to "why is it slow." Immich is a small stack — the app, a database, a cache, and a machine-learning component that powers faces and search:

• RAM: the ML features are the hungry part. A couple of gigabytes is a comfortable floor; give it more if your library is large and you want search to feel instant.
• Storage: this is the big one. Your photo library only grows, so plan for headroom — and remember that thumbnails and encoded versions add to the originals.
• A little CPU for the initial import, when it generates thumbnails and runs ML over everything you upload. It settles down once caught up.

The honest caveats

We run Immich for customers, so two things we'd tell a friend:

• It moves fast. Immich is one of the most actively developed self-hosted projects there is. That's mostly wonderful, but it means you should read the release notes before updating and take a snapshot first — occasionally a release changes something that needs a manual step.
• Backups are not optional. The whole point is that these photos live on your server now. That's only better than Google if the server is backed up and you've actually tested a restore. Immich's own database plus your photo files both need to be in the backup.

How to deploy it

A proper Immich install means running the app alongside its database, its cache and the ML service, with a volume big enough for your library, behind TLS on a domain so the mobile apps can reach it. On a VPS that's an educational evening and then a standing job — updates, storage, and those all-important backups. Or deploy Immich in one click with the whole stack, TLS and IPv6 wired up, sized for a growing library, and skip to the good part.

First run: get it right

1. Create your account and, once your users exist, disable public registration so your server isn't an open door.
2. Install the mobile app, point it at your server, and turn on background backup — then let it run on Wi-Fi overnight for the first big upload.
3. Import your existing library and give the machine-learning jobs time to catch up; faces and search fill in as it processes.
4. Set up and test backups before you delete anything from Google. Confidence first, deletion second.

Do that, and you have the thing self-hosters have wanted for a decade: Google Photos, without Google. For the wider comparison, see our roundup of self-hosted Google Photos alternatives.

Deploy Immich now → — or browse the full catalog.