If you have ever winced at your Google One bill, or felt uneasy about handing a decade of family photographs to a corporation’s cloud, Immich is the answer you have been looking for. With over 90,000 GitHub stars and a development pace that rivals commercial products, Immich has become the gold standard for self-hosted photo management — a genuine, feature-complete alternative to Google Photos that runs entirely on your own hardware, under your own control. This hub page brings together everything you need to understand, install, and get the most from Immich, whether you are a first-time self-hoster or an experienced homelab enthusiast looking to consolidate your media.
What Is Immich and Why Does It Matter?
Immich is a free, open-source photo and video management platform designed to replicate the experience of Google Photos without the recurring subscription fees or the privacy trade-offs. It gives you automatic mobile backup, face recognition, intelligent search powered by CLIP machine learning, shared albums, a map view of your memories, and full RAW file support — all running on a server you own. For UK households paying around £7.99 per month for Google One’s 2TB tier, the maths is compelling: your own hardware pays for itself quickly, and unlike Google’s storage, yours never expires or gets throttled. The guides in this cluster walk you through every aspect of the platform, from initial installation to long-term backup strategy.
Getting Started: Installation and System Requirements
Immich runs on Docker Compose, making deployment straightforward on any Linux host. The official recommendation is a minimum of 6GB of RAM, though 8GB or more is advisable if you plan to enable machine learning features such as face recognition and CLIP smart search. The application listens on port 2283 by default. Our installation guide covers the complete Docker Compose setup step by step, including environment configuration, volume mapping for your photo library, and the initial admin account creation. If you are new to Docker, the guide takes you from zero to a running instance in under thirty minutes.
For those running a Proxmox homelab, we have a dedicated guide on deploying Immich inside an LXC container — a leaner approach that avoids the overhead of a full virtual machine while keeping your photo server isolated from the rest of your infrastructure. We also cover hardware selection in depth, comparing the performance characteristics of a Raspberry Pi 5, an Intel NUC, and a QNAP or Synology NAS, so you can choose the right platform before you buy.
Connecting Your Phone: Automatic Mobile Backup
The killer feature for most users is seamless mobile backup. Immich has first-party apps for both iOS and Android that behave almost identically to the Google Photos app — open the app once, grant permissions, and your camera roll backs up automatically whenever you are on Wi-Fi. The apps support background sync, burst photo handling, video uploads, and selective album backup. Our mobile setup guide covers the full configuration process on both platforms, including how to point the app at a local IP address or a domain name if you have exposed Immich through a reverse proxy.
Putting Immich Behind a Reverse Proxy with SSL
Running Immich exclusively on your local network is fine for home use, but most people eventually want remote access — the ability to browse their photos from a café or share an album with a family member who is not on the same Wi-Fi. Our reverse proxy guide covers the complete Nginx configuration for Immich, including obtaining a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate with Certbot and the specific proxy headers and timeout settings that Immich requires for video streaming and large file uploads. A properly configured reverse proxy means you get HTTPS access from anywhere without exposing your Docker host directly to the internet.
Intelligent Search and Face Recognition
One of Immich’s most impressive capabilities is its machine learning stack. CLIP-powered smart search lets you type a natural language description — “sunset on the beach” or “birthday cake with candles” — and surface matching photos without any manual tagging. Face recognition groups portraits by identity, and once you name a face, Immich surfaces that person’s photos across your entire library. Both features run locally inside a dedicated machine learning Docker container, meaning your images are never sent to an external API for analysis. Our guide to face recognition and smart search explains how to tune the confidence thresholds, handle edge cases such as glasses or ageing, and manage performance on lower-powered hardware.
How Immich Compares to Google Photos and Other Self-Hosted Alternatives
Immich is not the only option in the self-hosted photo space, and it is worth understanding where it sits relative to both commercial and open-source alternatives. Our Immich versus Google Photos comparison covers the feature parity in detail — what Immich does just as well, what it does differently, and the handful of areas where Google’s platform still has an edge, such as third-party integrations and Chromecast support. For those considering other open-source tools, our Immich versus PhotoPrism versus Piwigo comparison breaks down the architectural differences, performance characteristics, and use-case fit for each platform. Immich tends to win on active development and mobile experience; PhotoPrism appeals to those who want a more mature codebase; Piwigo suits users who need a public-facing gallery rather than a private family archive.
Building a Robust Backup Strategy
One of the most important principles in self-hosting is that a self-hosted photo library is only as safe as its backup strategy. Immich stores your originals in a standard directory structure on the host filesystem, which makes it compatible with any backup tool that can read files. Our backup strategy guide covers the 3-2-1 approach as applied to Immich — keeping three copies of your data, on two different media types, with one copy offsite. We walk through practical implementations using tools like Restic, Rclone, and Borgbackup, as well as how to back up the Postgres database that Immich relies on for metadata, faces, and albums. Losing the database without a backup means losing all your albums, shared links, and face assignments even if the image files survive.
Explore the Full Immich Guide Series
Each topic introduced above has a dedicated in-depth guide linked from this hub. Whether you are setting up Immich for the first time, migrating an existing Google Photos library, or hardening a production installation for your whole household, the guides below cover it all. Start with the installation guide if you are new, or jump directly to whichever topic is most relevant to where you are in your self-hosting journey.
Immich Guides
- What Is Immich? The Self-Hosted Google Photos Alternative
- How to Install Immich with Docker Compose
- Immich vs Google Photos: Is Self-Hosting Worth It?
- How to Set Up Immich Mobile Backup on iPhone and Android
- How to Run Immich on Proxmox: LXC Container Setup
- How to Put Immich Behind a Reverse Proxy with SSL
- Immich Hardware Requirements: Raspberry Pi, NUC, or NAS?
- Immich Face Recognition and Smart Search: How to Enable It
- How to Back Up Immich: Protecting Your Photo Library
- Immich vs PhotoPrism vs Piwigo: Best Self-Hosted Photo App?
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