Immich, explained

# Immich, explained Immich is a self-hosted photo and video library. You install it on a machine you own, point your phone at it, and it backs up your camera roll automatically — the same job Google Photos or iCloud does, on hardware that belongs to you. ## The problem it solves Phone photo libraries have a habit of becoming someone else's business. **They get expensive quietly.** A few years of 48-megapixel photos and 4K video outgrow every free tier. The monthly fee is small enough to ignore and never stops, and it rises with your library, not your income. **Leaving gets harder the longer you stay.** Exports arrive as archives with mangled metadata, broken albums, and faces you have to teach all over again. The cost of switching is deliberately high. **Your library is readable by the provider.** Not necessarily by a person, but by systems: scanned, classified, and used to improve products you never asked about. For most people most of the time that is fine. For some photos, it isn't. **And it can end.** Services get discontinued, priced differently, or restricted in your country. Nothing you did caused it and nothing you can do prevents it. ## What Immich actually gives you The important thing is that it doesn't ask you to give anything up: - **Automatic phone backup** on iOS and Android, in the background, on Wi-Fi - **Search that works** — by date, place, and content, including "show me the dog on the beach", which runs on your own machine - **Faces and people**, grouped automatically, computed locally - **Albums and sharing** with people who don't have accounts - **Timeline and map views**, and a memories feature - **Multiple users**, so a household shares one server with separate libraries Your photos sit on your disk as ordinary files. If you ever stop using Immich, they're still there in folders you can read — which is the strongest thing that can be said about any storage system. ## Who should run it **Good fit if:** your phone nags you about storage, you already own a NAS or a small home server, you have more than one person's photos to look after, or you simply want the library to be yours. **Less good if:** you have no hardware and no interest in owning any, or nobody in the house can be responsible for a backup. Self-hosting moves the responsibility to you along with the control. ## What it needs Modest, but not nothing. Any x86 mini PC or NAS from the last several years handles it. Roughly 4 GB of RAM, more if you want the machine-learning features comfortable, and enough disk for your library plus room to grow. A Raspberry Pi will run it, but photo search and face recognition will feel slow. Docker does the heavy lifting, which is why the install is the same recipe on almost any Linux machine. ## The honest catch **You own the backups now.** Immich keeps your photos; it does not protect them from a failed disk, a mistaken delete, or a fire. A single copy on a NAS is not a backup, and RAID isn't either — it survives a dead drive, not a deleted album. Plan for a second copy somewhere else before you move your only copy of anything irreplaceable. This is the one part people skip, and it's the one that matters. The software is also under rapid development. It is stable enough for daily use by a lot of people, but pin your version and read release notes before jumping. ## Where we come in None of the above is hard, exactly. It's just a chain of small decisions — which compose file, where the library lives, how updates work, what a restore looks like — and getting one wrong is only obvious later. We install Immich on your machine, set up backups properly, show you how to run it, and write down what we did. One payment, no ongoing fee, and it stays yours afterwards. If you'd rather not touch a terminal, that's exactly what this is for.