Immich Self-Hosted Photo Library

Immich is the closest thing to Google Photos you can host yourself. Automatic phone backup, a timeline, face recognition, semantic search, shared albums and a map view — all running on your own server. It is written in TypeScript, licensed AGPL-3.0, and has more than 110k stars on GitHub, making it the de facto default for self-hosted photo libraries.

What it does well

• Automatic phone backup: official iOS and Android apps, background upload, Wi-Fi only, charging only, per-album selection.
• AI search: face clustering, object detection and CLIP semantic search — you can literally search for "beach sunset dog".
• Real multi-user support: a separate account for each family member, shared albums, partner sharing, and clean permission boundaries.
• Original files kept: full-quality storage with RAW, HEIC, Live Photo and video transcoding support.

Images and ports

Server image ghcr.io/immich-app/immich-server:release, machine-learning image ghcr.io/immich-app/immich-machine-learning:release, plus PostgreSQL and Valkey (Redis). Web port 2283.

Deployment cost

Start with 2 vCPU / 4 GB RAM; the machine-learning container alone idles around 1 GB. Keep the system disk for the database and mount photos on a separate data disk. Put Nginx and HTTPS in front of it — the mobile app needs HTTPS for reliable background backup.

Full commands, Compose file, reverse proxy and backup strategy: Immich Docker deployment tutorial. We also offer a tested one-click deployment service from $99, delivered within 48 hours.