Immich

What is Immich?

Immich is an open-source, self-hosted alternative to cloud-based photo managers like Google Photos or Apple iCloud. Its primary mission is to provide users with complete control, ownership, and privacy over their personal media without relying on third-party servers. By running the software on personal hardware, users can securely back up their mobile device's camera roll seamlessly in the background. It utilizes advanced machine learning to offer powerful features like facial recognition, object detection, and intelligent search capabilities. Ultimately, it solves the problem of recurring cloud subscription fees while delivering a robust experience across both web and mobile platforms.

How to use Immich?

To use Immich, you must first deploy the server infrastructure on your own hardware or a VPS, typically using Docker Compose. Once the server is running, you configure an admin account through the web interface and can create additional user accounts for family or friends. Next, download the Immich mobile app (available on iOS and Android) and log in using your server's URL and credentials. Finally, enable automatic background backups in the app settings to continuously sync your smartphone's camera roll to your personal server, allowing you to seamlessly search, organize, and share your photos and videos.

Immich's Core Features

• Provides high-performance automatic background photo and video backups directly from your mobile device.

• Offers machine learning-powered facial recognition and object detection for intelligent, fast searching.

• Supports multiple users, allowing family members to maintain private libraries and share specific albums.

• Includes an interactive global map view to seamlessly browse media based on extracted geographic locations.

• Transcodes videos using hardware acceleration for smooth playback across all connected web and mobile devices.

• Retains full EXIF metadata and allows users to securely back up and browse uncompressed raw file formats.

• Features a storage management tool that helps safely remove previously backed-up media to free up mobile device space.

• Includes a dedicated read-only mode to prevent the accidental deletion or modification of important memories by younger users.

Immich's Use Cases

• #1

  Replacing Google Photos or iCloud with a privacy-focused, self-hosted alternative.

• #2

  Automatically backing up mobile photos and videos to a personal home server or NAS.

• #3

  Organizing family photos with multi-user support and collaborative shared albums.

• #4

  Searching through massive media libraries using machine learning-based facial and object recognition.

• #5

  Reclaiming storage space on a mobile device by securely offloading media to a self-managed server.

• #6

  Viewing EXIF metadata, map locations, and original raw files in a highly responsive web gallery.