Immich without Google Photos

The email arrives when you are not expecting it: your storage is almost full, here are your upgrade options. For most people it lands somewhere between an annoyance and a shrug. I want to describe what it actually is, because the framing everyone uses is slightly wrong and the wrongness matters.

It is not a bill for storage. Storage is cheap and getting cheaper every year. It is the moment at which the twelve years of family photographs you have accumulated stop being a possession and start being a position in someone else's system — one you now pay monthly to maintain, indefinitely, with no exit that does not involve real work.

That is not a complaint about anyone's pricing. It is a description of where the leverage sits, and photographs are the category where it sits hardest, because nobody deletes them and everybody would notice if they were gone.

What Immich gives you

The short version: it is the photo application you already use, running on your own machine. An app on each phone that uploads new pictures automatically in the background, a timeline you scroll, albums, sharing, search — and the search is the part that surprises people, because it recognises faces and finds things by what is in the picture rather than only by date.

That last capability deserves a note, because it is the thing that makes this genuinely competitive rather than a worthy compromise. The recognition runs on your hardware. Nothing is sent anywhere to be analysed. As somebody who works with these models professionally, I find that combination — the capability without the transmission — the most interesting thing about the project.

The practical shape at home: every phone in the house backs up to one machine. Each person sees their own library; shared albums are explicit. Nobody has to remember to do anything, which is the only backup design that survives contact with a family.

The property I actually care about

Underneath all of it, the photographs are files. Ordinary files, in folders, in their original formats, readable by anything.

This sounds obvious and it is not. Plenty of photo systems store your pictures inside a database or a proprietary container, and the practical consequence appears years later when you want to leave or when the software stops being maintained. With Immich, if the application vanished tomorrow, I would copy a folder and lose nothing at all. The application is a convenient way to look at the files; it is not where they live.

That is the test I apply to anything holding data I cannot recreate. Where are the files, what format are they in, and what happens to them if this software disappears. A system that answers those three badly is a system I will not put a family's photographs into, regardless of how good the interface is.

The responsibility you are accepting

I want to be blunt here, because this is the article where enthusiasm does the most damage.

When your photographs are with a large provider, an entire team of people you will never meet is responsible for them not being lost. They replicate across locations, they replace failing drives before anybody notices, they have done this for hundreds of millions of accounts. That service is real and it is the main thing you are paying for. Do not let anybody tell you the subscription buys nothing.

Move the library home and that responsibility becomes yours. One machine with one drive is not safe; it is a single object that can fail, be stolen or burn, taking twelve years with it. Self-hosting photographs without a second copy somewhere else is strictly worse than the subscription you left, and I have met people who did exactly that and considered themselves more careful for it.

The minimum I consider acceptable, and what I configure on every machine I hand over: two drives in the server so a single failure is not an event, and an automatic copy to a second location — another building, or an encrypted copy at a provider, which is a perfectly reasonable use of exactly the services this article is otherwise arguing against. Nothing about self-hosting requires purity.

Who this is genuinely for

Households with a lot of photographs and a long horizon. The arithmetic works because photo libraries only grow and because the people in them expect to still have the pictures in twenty years — which is a length of time over which monthly payments and changing terms both compound.

It is not for somebody with three hundred pictures and no interest in any of this, and I will say so rather than sell them a machine. The free tier of a hosted service is a perfectly good answer to that situation and the honest recommendation.

What tipped it for me personally was not cost. It was noticing that the most irreplaceable data I own — the pictures of people who are no longer here, which cannot be recreated by any amount of money — was sitting in an arrangement I did not control, governed by terms I had not read, on the condition that I keep paying. Once that sentence formed properly in my head, the monthly amount stopped being the relevant question.