Immich

Immich is a self-hosted photo and video platform that gives you everything you love about Google Photos without handing your entire camera roll to a corporation. It runs in Docker, feels genuinely polished to use, and handles everything from automatic mobile backup to shared family albums. It's become one of the most popular open source homelab projects around, and once you've used it, it's easy to see why.

The problem it solves is one a lot of people quietly sit with: you want your photos backed up automatically and easy to browse, but you're not comfortable with a tech giant holding copies of every picture you've ever taken. Immich puts your photos on your own hardware, on your own terms. The mobile app syncs in the background the moment you take a shot, so everything is protected without you ever having to think about it.

What makes it stand out is how much it packs in under the hood. Facial recognition, semantic search that actually understands what's in a photo, RAW file support, GPS map views, multi-user libraries, it covers ground that most self-hosted alternatives don't come close to. Whether you're a solo photographer or setting it up for the whole family, it holds its own against anything in the cloud.

Key Features

• Automatic mobile backup - runs quietly in the background on iOS and Android, syncing photos the moment they're taken
• Facial recognition - machine learning detects and tags faces across your entire library so you can find photos of specific people instantly
• Smart search - describe what you're looking for in plain language and Immich will find it, even if you've never tagged a thing
• RAW file support - handles CR2, NEF, ARW, DNG, and more alongside standard JPEGs, so photographers aren't left out
• Shared albums and partner sharing - share collections with family or give a partner access to their own view of the library
• Map view - see your photos plotted geographically using the GPS data already embedded in your shots
• Multi-user support - separate libraries and admin controls mean it works just as well for a household as it does for one person
• Docker deployment - straightforward to spin up with Docker Compose, actively maintained, and updated frequently

Who It's For

Immich is the one to reach for if you want a self-hosted Google Photos replacement that actually feels like a finished product rather than a compromise. It's a great fit for photographers shooting in RAW who want smart organisation without being tied to Adobe or Apple. And if you've ever felt uneasy about a big tech company quietly sitting on decades of your personal photos, running your own Immich instance on a NAS or home server is a genuinely satisfying fix.