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Immich

Self-hosted photo and video backup with on-device ML — your own Google Photos.

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About

Immich is a high-performance, self-hosted photo and video management solution — the go-to open-source Google Photos alternative for the homelab crowd. You run the server (usually via Docker Compose), and mobile/desktop apps back up your library automatically.

All the smart features run locally with machine learning: facial recognition, object detection, and semantic search over your photos. Licensed AGPL-3.0, extremely active development, and one of the most-starred self-hosted projects on GitHub.

What it can do

  • Automatic photo/video backup from mobile
  • Facial recognition and object detection
  • Semantic (natural-language) photo search
  • Shared albums and partner sharing
  • Fully offline, no cloud account needed

Setup

  1. Install Docker and Docker Compose.
  2. Download the official docker-compose.yml and .env from the Immich repo.
  3. Run docker compose up -d.
  4. Open the web UI, create your account, and install the mobile app.
  5. Point the app at your server — backups and ML jobs start automatically.

Prerequisites

Docker and Docker Compose; a machine with enough storage for your photo library; a GPU helps ML jobs but isn't required.

Use cases

others

Works with

Trust score — 9/10

/10 trustVerified

Scored 9/10 (verified tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: 116k stars — among the most-starred self-hosted projects on GitHub; pushed 2026-10-13 — extremely active; AGPL-3.0 — strong copyleft. Manual review: the de-facto self-hosted Google Photos; on-device ML (face/object/semantic search) is the real moat. License: AGPL-3.0.

★ 116,128 GitHub stars

How the trust score is built

Full methodology →
Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
10.0/10
Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
10.0/10
Openness · license + docs
7.0/10
Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
9.0/10
  • · 116k stars — among the most-starred self-hosted projects on GitHub
  • · pushed 2026-10-13 — extremely active
  • · AGPL-3.0 — strong copyleft
  • · manual review: the de-facto self-hosted Google Photos; on-device ML (face/object/semantic search) is the real moat

Sources

Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.