Immich

Overview

Immich is a self-hosted home for your photo and video library, the Google Photos experience without handing your memories to anyone else. Install the iOS or Android app, point it at this server, and it backs up your camera roll in the background, keeping the originals at full resolution rather than a re-compressed copy.

Features

• Automatic background backup from the iOS and Android apps, at full original resolution
• Search by what's in a picture ("red bicycle", "beach at sunset"), not just by filename
• Faces grouped into people you can name, and a map of where each shot was taken
• Shareable albums and a duplicate finder for the same photo saved more than once
• Search, face recognition, and duplicate detection all run on this machine's CPU, on your photos, with nothing sent to a third party

Setting up

The first account you register after install becomes the administrator.

If you already have photos on this server, grant Immich your Photos folder at install, then add that folder as an External Library from Administration → Libraries. Immich indexes those files in place and never modifies them.

Good to know

Immich keeps your library in its own layout inside the app's data directory rather than as loose files you browse yourself; the Photos folder grant is a read-only import source, not the library itself. Because search and face recognition run on CPU, the first pass over a large existing library can take a while and runs in the background; it catches up over time, and new uploads are indexed as they arrive.