Self Hosted Google Photos Alternative

I've been on the hunt for a Google Photos alternative for a number of years if I'm being honest. My Google account has been near the 15GB limit on and off for a while which is what caused me to look for a self-hosted alternative. I've had my account set to storage saver for a while which is fine but I'd much rather have the full quality/original photos.

Around a year ago I switched to using Nextcloud as this has a built in automatic backup feature in the mobile app making it ideal for this... or so I thought. This was all fine until I uploaded my few thousand photos and it began to chug a little.

A few weeks ago I heard people talking about Immich and decided to take a look. I set it up in what I thought was just going to be a temporary environment but it immediately took over. For one you can load all of your photos in a timeline immediately because it just loads smaller thumbnails of the photos that it generates as you upload them which is quite brilliant. I'm sure Google probably does the same thing. I can't say this for Nextcloud which explains the slowness.

Immich does a lot of other clever things in the background too such as facial recognition for example so it can group all photos of a particular person together.

After uploading all of my photos and videos from Nextcloud to Immich from my PC I decided to give the Android app a look since this is what I would be using to interact with the system most of the time anyway. I was immediately shocked by how similar it looks to Google Photos which is handy as a long-term user. This makes the switch much easier. I'd got automatic uploads setup almost immediately and turned off battery optimisation so the upload task would continue regardless of whether I had the app open. It mentioned that this is quite important so thought I'd better follow the advice.

Since setting this up I've had time to play around with it, photos upload almost immediately after being taken. Obviously being self-hosted too I don't have to rely on some other company to not loose my data.

Setup

So, how did I choose to set this up? I went down the Docker route, this seems the most simple. I thought about Kubernetes then decided that an LXC container running Docker would be considerably easier to expand storage on later for example. Instructions for setting this up yourself are here.

It was quite honestly a really simple setup, their documentation explains everything in great detail. Another thing to note is that once I was in Immich I didn't need to go back to the documentation a single time, very user friendly system.

Features

I'm going to put a list here of the features I found particularly useful or just cool.

• Creates thumbnails of photos to make the timeline load nice and fast
• Has what I can only describe as a Timehop type system if anybody remembers that where it can show you photos you've taken on this day in previous years
• Easy import of existing photos
• Supports multiple users so you can invite friends and family
• You can create shareable links that you can share with friends and family without them even needing an account. You can even put a password on the link
• View all of your photos on a map

Final Thoughts

The project is still very much under active development with the first stable release planned for early this year (2025). You can check up on progress on their roadmap.

The project has been about since early 2022 and shows no signs of disappearing. It seems to be hugely popular so I'm quite surprised I hadn't come across it until now!

I highly recommend you give this project a try if like me you're stuck with the limitations of your current photo/video management application. I'm very excited to see where this project goes and will be keeping a close eye on how it's coming along.