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Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage
- pavel_lishin 1mo ago> 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.
- toomuchtodo 1mo agoDocs for context: https://docs.immich.app/features/mobile-backup/ https://docs.immich.app/features/mobile-backup/ https://github.com/immich-app/immich https://github.com/immich-app/immich
- _blk 1mo agoEasy read but indeed. That's what I read the article for. I'm very happy with Photoprism but the box is not always on and I'd like to keep a cached set of photos on my phone while also having automatic (multi-user) sync whenever the box is available..
- tclancy 1mo agoIt does and it’s seamless for me. Which takes the angst out of “should I keep this photo or video” once your phone is old and full out of the equation.
- normalaccess 1mo agoFantastic project. I have been using it for about a year and have had no problems yet. Building another box to deploy for family.
- exabrial 1mo agoCan this sync when you migrate onto LAN?
- toomuchtodo 1mo ago> By default, Immich will only upload photos and videos when connected to Wi-Fi. You can change this behavior in the backup settings page.
- _ink_ 1mo agoGreat project, saved my photos when the Pixel device wasn't as waterproof as promised.
- LandoCalrissian 1mo agoI 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 1mo ago"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.
- iAMkenough 1mo agoOr you can use this and pay no dollar per month for an accessible indexed search of 12+ months of photos, not used to train AI models.
- carlosjobim 1mo agoYes, I already pay no dollar per month for storing my photos in a folder and it's not used to train any AI model.
- jaymmartin 1mo agoI don't understand these types of comments. It's clear you don't value the features Immich provides. Can you not imagine someone else valuing them? What are you trying to communicate to us? Maybe you are just trying to tell people that they can get away with simpler solution if all they care about is unscheduled photo backup. If so, I feel there is a less antagonistic way for you to say it.
- carlosjobim 1mo agoThe only thing I wanted to communicate is that "easier than ever" shouldn't be anywhere in the article. Neither should really the part about saving money, but others have mentioned it, so I don't have to. Otherwise I think Immich seems like a cool project, and I hope they're successful. I added the part about putting photos in a folder, to at least contribute with a different solution, which for me has worked very well for very long.
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- Muromec 1mo agoI'm using photoprism for a few years now, but the companion app on the phone is always the pain point.
- hamdingers 1mo agoI made the switch from photoprism to immich a couple years ago and the app is far better. Sad to hear it hasn't improved in the mean time.
- bix6 1mo agoI’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.
- preya2k 1mo agoYeah, sharing is one of the big problems with Immich. You either need to expose your whole instance to make share links publicly accessible (and there's no way to secure user accounts with 2FA), or create user accounts for the people you want to share with and/or invite them and set up your VPN for them to access the shares. There's https://github.com/alangrainger/immich-public-proxy https://github.com/alangrainger/immich-public-proxy, which is a weird workaround (it's a separate gallery frontend that syncs with your instance to only expose this specific service, so you can keep your Immich instane private).
- toomuchtodo 1mo agoIs there a way to sponsor a feature request to improve the sharing and user auth story? Passkeys could be used here (versus MFA/2FA), because if the passkey is lost, you can simply delete it and have the known user go through the onboarding flow again to create a new passkey.
- vanrohan 1mo agoOpen Noodle is a fork of Immich which addresses the lack of Sharing: https://opennoodle.de/features/?category=sharing https://opennoodle.de/features/?category=sharing
- Arya_xiaofan 1mo ago[dead]
- ojdh 1mo agoGreat 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
- zidad 1mo agoWhy would it not be accessible to your family? Immich allows sharing links
- hobofan 1mo agoIt is possible in general, but almost everybody doing self hosting (and as outlined in the article) does it on a local network and not on the internet. Most people that self host don't want to have to be a sysadmin in their free time in order to have a reasonable risk of not leaking all your families photos to the internet.
- gf000 1mo agoThere is an immich proxy project: https://github.com/alangrainger/immich-public-proxy https://github.com/alangrainger/immich-public-proxy I wouldn't make the instance itself public, but I think this is a decent tradeoff. Of course still requires one to be a sysadmin.
- hamdingers 1mo agoGoogle Photos is a great value proposition, but it's still only 1 copy in 1 medium. If you count your phone as another copy/medium you still need a 3rd copy somewhere if you want to follow the 3-2-1 backup strategy. > not accessible to my family My family has no trouble with it, the UX is excellent. My retirement age parents are regularly adding photos to shared albums and things like that.
- oxedom 1mo agoI wrote my own blog about moving to self-hosting on Hetzner with Immich https://www.sam-brink.com/posts/self-host https://www.sam-brink.com/posts/self-host
- cdrnsf 1mo agoI 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.
- bix6 1mo agoAny info on your public proxy setup?
- bo0tzz 1mo agoLikely https://github.com/alangrainger/immich-public-proxy https://github.com/alangrainger/immich-public-proxy
- cdrnsf 1mo agoI started there and ended up rewriting it in Preact/Go which is the direction I've been heading with the apps I maintain for myself.
- turbocon 1mo agoNot the commenttor, however I personally am a big fan of Cloudflare tunnels.
- drdexebtjl 1mo agoI 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.
- tehlike 1mo agoGoogle takeout is pretty good with exporting photos.
- adolph 1mo agoLast I checked Takeout is a single zip file. Once you have a photo repository of a certain size, that approach becomes difficult, no?
- madduci 1mo agoThey do also split up to 2GB archives. So they are very manageable
- tehlike 1mo agoYou can change the split size. But yes.
- tehlike 1mo agoI exported something like 450GB photos in chunks of 50GB iirc. Tip: export the takeout to Google drive then download it from there. Otherwise link downloads have # of times you can retry before they are deleted.
- TheJCDenton 1mo agoBe aware that for a few 100's Go the google takeout files will contains corrupted data. You have to make at least 2 takeout to be sure to have all your files in good shape. The problem is notto download but to verify and be sure nothing else is missing.
- jmathai 1mo agoImmich 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-photo-management-system-immich-edition/ https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/my-ridiculously-robust-pho...
- skrtskrt 1mo agoIt 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.
- rootusrootus 1mo agoI believe that's a setting, you can have it store the files in a more predictable directory hierarchy. Though it's better to make that choice early on before doing a lot of imports.
- blmarket 1mo agohttps://docs.immich.app/administration/storage-template/ https://docs.immich.app/administration/storage-template/ is their best attempt to address your concern, but honestly I'm fine with navigating my photos solely using immich. (with annual backup copy stored in cold cloud storage)
- drdexebtjl 1mo agoWhat do you mean opaquely named directories? It’s yyyy/yyyy-MM-dd/originalFileName. Those opaquely named files are the thumbnails. Immich will also index your folders as they are. It’s called “External Libraries” in the documentation.
- zvr 1mo agoFor this exact reason, I'm using Immich by pointing it to my folder structure as an "external library" https://docs.immich.app/features/libraries/ https://docs.immich.app/features/libraries/
- ValtteriL 1mo agoI 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 1mo agoAs 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.
- oftenwrong 1mo agoThat's me in a nutshell. I have close to 300GiB in Google Photos, mostly photos and videos of my children. I take a lot of photographs because getting a good shot, for me, is mostly a matter of luck. I don't delete that many photos because it's active work and I don't really care to spend the time. I do curate an album of decent ones, just so the few people who care can see new photos and videos every now and then. I pay a relatively small fee for 2 TiB of space.
- krupan 1mo agoOne 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 1mo agoVery curious about how frictionless is the Immich - iPhone / iCloud Photos sync, especially offloaded photos.
- ochronus 1mo agoImmich 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 1mo agoI 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 :)
- mococa 1mo agoI use with borgbase and borgmatic
- tripleee 1mo agoImmich seems way too complex for what I need. Redis, Postgres and Docker just to look at your photos? Eugh I just use Shotwell: https://shotwell-project.org/ https://shotwell-project.org/
- bo0tzz 1mo agoShotwell is great, but it's a single-machine photo organizer; I don't think you can really compare it to Immich on level ground.
- oftenwrong 1mo agoThe greatest weakness of Google Photos is that it has no real incremental, automated backup features. If it could incrementally sync over to other services, it would be much better. The closest is to manually use Google Takeout to export specific time ranges, and then copy those elsewhere.
- inventor7777 1mo agoI gave Immich a fair try, but it could not replace Apple Photos for my use case. YMMV, but my favorite Photos app features simply weren't available. I use Apple's top-notch editing for all sorts of stuff - RAW images, videos, basic enhancements, etc. When I tested, Immich didn't have very good, if any, editing features. I also love Apple's search functions, and it Just Works™. I'm sure Immich has similar, but I know it would take a lot of processing to make it happen. I also did not really care for Immich's UI, it felt overly basic and Material Design to me, but that is only personal preference. Another gap is metadata. In Apple Photos I can tap the little "I" icon to see a lot of capture metadata, and in Immich I did not see an equivalent to how good Apple's one is.
- drdexebtjl 1mo ago> I'm sure Immich has similar, but I know it would take a lot of processing to make it happen. It’s less than you think! Consider that Apple’s image recognition happens on your phone. Also, it doesn’t matter if indexing is slow, as long as the photos are indexed before you need to search for them. I used to run Immich on a 2nd gen Core i3.
- Manglo 1mo agoI have google photos and pay 10$ / Month. I also have a zfs based fileserver setup were i do snapshots before i backup from my desktop were i manage my pictures. I backup my zfs based filesystem online for off-side. My images (a lot of pictures, dslr quality, raw) is around 2tb. You don't just replicate what a company like Google does for you for 10$ and without knowing stuff about...
- PixelTask 1mo agoIf you need a 2TB storage you can try Archivios app in AppStore.
- nilleo 1mo agoMy primary use case for Immich is not as a Google Photos replacement, but as a backup of my photos that are on Google Photos. With all the horror stories in the past of folks getting locked out of their Google accounts (and this all Google services) for misunderstandings without a successful appeal, I don't want to risk losing all of my memories just because Google decided that they needed to lock my account for some reason or another. I'll trust that Google won't lose my data but I don't trust that they will continue to let me access it indefinitely.
- illiac786 1mo agoI don’t get that. Why isn’t google takeout easier, simpler, faster? Am I missing something?
- miladyincontrol 1mo agoI mean I have dozens of TBs of raw photos, google photos or icloud simply arent an option. And the thing I particularly enjoy about immich is that it's semantic searching is leagues better than any of the proprietary solutions in a lot of use cases. Particularly it works amazing for various brands and IP that 'cloud' offerings simply wont recognize.
- joshspankit 1mo agoI like this article more than I like Immich. It’s well structured, helpful, and kind (not that Immich isn’t those things). I feel like Futo is going in the wrong direction. In the age of AI, anyone can write a DB query, anyone can design a simple UI, and with docker the structure of hosting is no longer a barrier. I think Futo and Immich should be focusing on data itself. Export, import, store, parse metadata, process, suggest relationships
- illiac786 1mo agoEveryone can write it, sure. You can even maintain it. You just can’t do it for every single SaaS service in your life, it’s not sustainable for most. The sane approach is: Is there something out there with a solid community that fulfils this need? If yes, let’s not vibe code project N. I think there is this huge wave of projects which will die off when the devs realise the time it takes to maintain it, even with AI. The amount of code produced will remain significantly higher than before AI, but it will go down a bit, compared to the peak (and I’m not sure we’ve reached peak)
- joshspankit 1mo agoYou missed the core of what I was saying: not vibe code a whole thing end to end (I agree, not sustainable), embrace the idea of having devs build the storage, parsers, schema, and security and let everyone vibe code the rest. Like, let’s use a simple photos example: a photo file has metadata standards already embedded, but doesn’t store it’s edit history, event, or who’s in it. Immich already does a lot that’s great here with parsers and ML and if they changed focus to the data storage layer they could essentially boil down to a table for edit history, a table for events, a table for people, etc, the ability to store in SQLite or sidecars, and an API layer for people to hand to their AI. Not only would it reduce the dev load, but then we could have an ever-expanding sphere of personal data ownership as Futo adds schemas/tables for video, audio, documents, and maybe everything else most people need to build their own UIs for specific uses or even “god view” UIs.
- illiac786 1mo ago
- illiac786 1mo agoIt’s data privacy. You won’t save any money, google is dirt cheap when it comes to storage, because of their scale. (I’m talking storage you can use for Immich pictures) In hindsight I am baffled that I accepted for google to have all my pictures, scan all the faces, etc. Insane. But when everyone is doing it, it turns something off in the brain. I attended a seminar where the explanation was: We don’t have the cognitive resource to do a deep analysis (or any analysis) of every single decision every minute, which is why, evolutionary, we relied on crowd wisdom to move such decisions from CPU to ASIC, the ASIC being “is everyone else doing it?”. I am still angry at myself that I gave them my pictures for years, the pictures of my relatives’ kids, etc. @Immich team: pleeeeease add the horizon straightening feature.
- humanlity 1mo agoIn my experience, if you want to use all Immich ML features fluently, the device fee is much more expensive than the Google subscription fee. I think there is only one metric that can attract people, which is privacy.