It seemed that Immich came out of nowhere, but suddenly all my colleagues were using it. I don’t like self-hosting as much as some of them, so I’m surprised, but the more I look at it, the more it becomes clear that this photo management solution has become a dream hit.
The question is: why? At first glance Immich that’s not all, but there’s a reason (or five) why people ditch cloud subscriptions in favor of managing their own digital photo collections.
It’s actually similar to Google Photos
Imitation, flattery and all that jazz
I made a generalization services we release for open source alternatives Not too long ago, and Immich was high on the list, not just because of how polished it is, but because of how boldly it mimics the look, feel, and operation of Google Photos.
Now, Google Photos is probably the most used photo management app in the world, given that it’s on almost every Android device, it makes sense to make the transition as easy as possible. It also helps that Google Photos is well designed and easy to use, and it’s always worth copying.
Immich is a Trojan horse that helps you host yourself without feeling like you’re giving up on polished, commercial software. In other words, and I mean this in the kindest way, no feel it as typical open source software.
It solves the toughest problem: automatic phone backups
Trust is the most important thing
While I personally love the AI search aspect of Google Photos, and it’s helped me find the right images in the tens of thousands of photos I’ve taken since the service launched, it’s never been a major value proposition.
Any photo I take with my phone is automatically backed up to the cloud as soon as I have a network connection. It has become such a reliable expectation that I don’t even think about it anymore. I just take a picture and the next time I check it will be waiting in my Google Photos account.
This is something that Immich must absolutely nail or the whole thing will fall apart. Immich’s mobile apps eliminate that friction to a large extent. Once configured, new photos and videos are automatically uploaded in the background, giving you the same “set it and forget it” experience that Google has perfected.
My colleague Patrick Campagnale Google has given up on Photos and went to Immich. As far as I can tell, it still is. Although he has one of the most impressive home labs I’ve ever seen, when explaining why he moved to Immich, he noted that you don’t really have to host Immich if you don’t want to. You can also host it in the cloud, but that negates some of the privacy benefits of self-hosting.
It embraced AI without locking users into the cloud
The magic of machine learning
I know I said earlier that seamless automatic backups were more important than the fancy smart search feature in Google Photos, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important.
The ability to search for a person or a term like “3D printer” or “brown dog in a hat” isn’t just a nice bonus. At least for me, it’s the fastest way to find the images I’m looking for. I’m really bad at organizing my photos into albums, and even if I did, they would still contain a large number of photos.
It’s a tough job, but Immich is up to it. In it characteristics documents you can see how many different aspects of an image you can search for. Here it is reproduced verbatim:
|
Kind |
Description |
|---|---|
|
People |
Recognized faces in your photos/videos. |
|
Contextual |
Content of photos and videos. |
|
File name or extension |
Full or partial file name or file extension |
|
Full path or folder |
Full or partial folder names from the original path. |
|
Description |
Description added to assets. |
|
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) |
Text in pictures |
|
Locations |
Cities, states and countries without reverse geocoding. |
|
Tags |
Tags assigned or removed from assets. |
|
Camera |
Make, model and lens model |
|
Time frame |
The start and end date of a specific time package |
|
Media type |
Photo or video or both |
|
Display options |
Not in Archive, Favorites, or any albums |
|
Star rating |
User assigned star rating |
This means you still get Google’s superior “AI” features, but without the Google baggage. No wonder people flock to Immich.
Ten years ago, convincing people to keep their photo libraries would have been a tough sell. Cloud storage was relatively cheap, privacy wasn’t a major concern, and affordable home servers were nearly as common.
Self-hosting is a fast-growing practice today, and some people don’t even realize they’re doing it because they don’t think of programs like Plex or Jellyfin in those terms. But there is a huge global self-hosting community, and Immich is benefiting from coming into the picture at the right time for people to want something like it. So it’s the right tool at the right time, at the right time, and definitely at the right price.
