Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage

pavel_lishin

> The ability to upload photos from your device automatically I don't think the article actually covers this; they mention installing the immich app on your device and uploading a photo, but it's not at all clear that this will automatically back up all photos taken on your phone.

normalaccess

Fantastic project. I have been using it for about a year and have had no problems yet. Building another box to deploy for family.

exabrial

Can this sync when you migrate onto LAN?

_ink_

Great project, saved my photos when the Pixel device wasn't as waterproof as promised.

LandoCalrissian

I switched earlier this year and it has been really good. Exporting and uploading your google photos is a little time consuming because of the size, but other than that pretty pain free. After using it for a while I actually prefer it to google photos and think it does quite a few things better. I would recommend switching for sure.

carlosjobim

"it’s now easier than ever" Followed by 300 lines of obscure config commands and server configuration. Great... My solution: I connect my iPhone once or twice a year and import my photos to a folder on my hard drive. Then I delete the old photos from the phone. That has worked fine for a couple of decades now. Or you can use iCloud or Google Photos, which is about one dollar per month.

Muromec

I'm using photoprism for a few years now, but the companion app on the phone is always the pain point.

bix6

I’m currently using Photos Mobile with Synology but planning to setup Immich soon. The article doesn’t cover sharing which is the one hiccup in all this. Apple makes it so easy to share galleries and I don’t want to expose my NAS. Cost wise it’s close to parity if you backup offsite. But worth it to move out of their ecosystem. I literally did not have some of my original files since apple shifts things off disk to preserve storage space.

ojdh

Great project but I believe Google Photos pricing is quite reasonable and alluring. I've always considered using something like this but the fact that it's backed up locally (to backup on cloud I have to pay for another service) and not accessible to my family kind of puts me off from setting up something like this

oxedom

I wrote my own blog about moving to self-hosting on Hetzner with Immich https://www.sam-brink.com/posts/self-host

cdrnsf

I love this project — I replaced Apple photos with it and it's been smooth sailing the whole way through. I have a public proxy sitting in front of it as well (which it makes easy by letting you configure external sharing URLs), so I can share out password-protected or public galleries and accept uploads without exposing it directly.

drdexebtjl

I use Immich, but saved me money it has not. Unless you actually go through the "Backing up your photos" step, you _will_ lose your photos, it's just a matter of time. And if you're like most people, that is probably not acceptable. And by the time you do the math for the cost of your backups, you'll find Google Photos pricing is actually pretty good. Still worth it, imo.

jmathai

Immich is such a wonderful piece of OSS software. I've replaced Google Photos with it. And then some. For the nerds... https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/my-ridiculously-robust-pho...

skrtskrt

It drives me crazy that it shards your photos all over the place in opaquely named directories so you can’t actually find anything without its database index. Photoprism is the best one I’ve found that will just take and index your folders as they are.

ValtteriL

I made the jump to Immich a month ago after having to prune my Drive more and more often as my free Drive quota ran totally out after 8 years of freeloading. My homelab had spare capacity and I had already offsite backups to Hetzner Storage Box sorted out so it didn't take long or increase my costs. Very good experience so far. I moved all my photos including multiple complete wedding albums to it, something I couldn't do with Drive without "converting". Nice to finally have all the Google Photos goodies for everything. Shout out to immich-go, a cli tool for bulk uploads from Google takeout archives.

Noaidi

As a retired semi-professional photographer I find it amazing how many photos some people have in their library. A mother with over 200GB of photos, 80% are junk, repeats, etc. She never looks at them either. Most people would not need the storage they are using if the just took less photographs and edited more, but good on Immich.

krupan

One of the coolest things I've discovered with Immich is you can share an album link with a group of friends and they can all upload and download photos to/from that album without creating an account . It's way lower friction than anything else for sharing pics from a group activity or party or whatever.

import

Very curious about how frictionless is the Immich - iPhone / iCloud Photos sync, especially offloaded photos.

ochronus

Immich is wonderful, but if you're mostly looking for a solution to take your mind off the problem and don't want to self-host, try Ente photos.

Helmut10001

I love immich! On board since June 2026. But, here's a brief report on my evening installation project.. setting up Immich: Ingesting a 1.7TB library (160k+ RAW photos) is apparently not a standard task! - Thumbnails and ML vectors consumed hundreds of gigabytes. I had to move the library folder to a dedicated ZFS HDD (700GB currently). - ImageMagick uses 20GB RAM per Nikon RAW file (this triggered the Linux OOM-killer) - Container crashes filled the OS drive with 2GB _per_ core dump. I added `ulimits: core: 0` to the `docker-compose.yml` to stop core dumps and increased VM RAM to 48GB. I also added the following `.env` tweaks: ``` NODE_OPTIONS=--max-old-space-size=8192 VIPS_DISC_THRESHOLD=750m VIPS_CONCURRENCY=1 MAGICK_MEMORY_LIMIT=8G MAGICK_MAP_LIMIT=4G ``` Also, make sure to limit max logging size in `docker-compose.yml` - this alone cleared up 17GB of logs that were generated in just 4 hours for me: ```yaml logging: driver: "json-file" options: max-size: "10m" max-file: "3" ``` Then, setup offsite backups with sanoid/syncoid zfs snapshots in pull zero-trust-mode (next evening project :)