Immich is a self hosted photo and video management solution designed for people who want more control over their personal photo library. It is often considered an alternative to services such as Google Photos, but the biggest difference is that you can host Immich on your own server and keep your library under your own control. The project is open source and available under the AGPL-3.0 license.
The first thing that stands out about Immich is how polished it feels. Self hosted applications sometimes sacrifice usability for flexibility, but Immich manages to provide a modern web interface alongside Android and iOS mobile applications. The mobile app can automatically back up photos and videos, making the experience feel much closer to a commercial cloud photo service.
Immich goes well beyond simple photo storage. It provides albums, shared albums, public sharing, favorites, archives, memories, maps, RAW image support, Live Photos and Motion Photos, stacked photos, and external libraries. It also supports multiple users, which makes it practical for families or small groups running their own server.
Search is one of Immich's strongest features. Photos can be searched using metadata, objects, faces, and machine learning based image understanding. Facial recognition automatically detects and groups faces, allowing you to organize photos around people in your library.
The mobile backup experience is another major advantage. You can select which albums should be backed up, download media back to your device, and use background backup. This makes Immich particularly useful for replacing a cloud photo backup service while keeping the actual storage on your own hardware.
For more advanced users, Immich offers plenty of features for integrating it into an existing self hosted environment. There are API keys, a CLI uploader, OAuth integration, Prometheus monitoring, configurable storage templates, hardware video transcoding, database backups, and external libraries.
There is, however, an important downside to self hosting. You are responsible for the server, storage, updates, networking, and backups. Immich's own documentation recommends a 3-2-1 backup strategy and specifically warns that backing up the database alone is not enough. The database contains metadata and user information, while the actual photos and videos also need to be backed up separately.
Another consideration is resource usage. Immich's machine learning features can require additional CPU, RAM, and potentially GPU resources depending on the configuration. Facial recognition and other processing tasks can be particularly demanding when importing a large existing library.
Despite these requirements, Immich is remarkably complete. It combines automatic mobile backup, photo organization, intelligent search, facial recognition, sharing, and a polished gallery into a package that can replace many of the features people expect from commercial photo services.
Download Immich APK v3.3.5 - Software Mirrors |
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app-arm64-v8a-release.apk | 66.05 MB |
Immich APK v3.3.5 Release Notes:[!CAUTION] This version contains a fix for today's CA compromise (https://emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com/) as well as some nodejs security patches. While we don't believe this compromise brings an immediate danger to Immich instances, we still recommend that you update as soon as possible.https://xkcd.com/221/ What's Changed🔒 Security
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Pros
Excellent self hosted alternative to cloud photo services
Modern web and mobile applications
Automatic photo and video backup
Powerful search and facial recognition
Supports RAW images, Live Photos, and Motion Photos
Albums, sharing, memories, maps, and favorites
Multi-user and partner sharing support
API, CLI, OAuth, and monitoring features
Open source
Cons
Requires your own server and storage
You are responsible for maintaining the installation
Machine learning features can require significant resources
A proper backup strategy is still required
Large libraries can take considerable time to process
Final Verdict
Immich is an excellent choice for anyone who wants a modern photo management platform without handing their entire library to a cloud provider. Its combination of automatic mobile backup, intelligent search, facial recognition, sharing, and a polished interface makes it much more than a simple self hosted photo gallery.
The main tradeoff is responsibility. Unlike Google Photos or iCloud, there is no cloud provider handling your infrastructure and backups for you. If you are comfortable managing Docker, storage, and backups, Immich offers an impressive amount of functionality and control.
For self hosted users, Immich is one of the easiest recommendations in its category.
