Tonight, I stumbled upon Immich, a self-hosted photo and video management solution, and I’m blown away. With Immich, you can back up and organize all your photos and videos on your own server. It even promises AI-powered search of your media. Somehow Immich completely flew under my radar until now.
Key highlights of Immich:
- Self-hosted & open source: Run it on your own hardware so you own your data.
- Mobile app backup + slick web UI: It has Android/iOS apps for automatic backup and a polished browser interface for viewing your library.
- Smart AI search: Search by people, objects, place, or keyword using contextual CLIP models. No need to tag everything manually.
- Rich features: Albums, favorites, maps, videos, RAW support, sharing, and more, all in one place.
- Popular & actively developed: As I mentioned, it has 80k+ GitHub stars and a thriving community.
This is just what I found out in a few minutes of looking around, but you get the idea; Immich isn’t just some half-baked media gallery.
In This Article
How Did I Miss Immich?
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I honestly have no clue. I’ve been investigating NAS, and home storage the last few years, yet Immich completely slipped by me. In fact, just a month ago I started a thread about ditching cloud services for my media. In that thread I wrote:
“The plan is to finally ditch a bunch of the cloud storage bills I’ve been paying (Amazon, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Google Photos) and bring things to my home lab. Saving some cash and taking control of my data sounds like a win.”
That’s exactly how I feel: I want to end my reliance on Apple iCloud, Google Photos, Google Drive, Dropbox, and Amazon Photos and self-host instead. Also recently, I replied to a Linux forum thread: Synology alternatives and DIY NAS setups. So I’m searching. It’s just a bit wild that something this active and well-designed escaped my attention until today. I’m sharing this in hopes that I’m not the only one!
A Polished Interface and AI Search
Like the website, the UI looks polished. The official website and docs showcase a clean, modern design. Take a look at these screenshots of the web interface and mobile app for iOS and Android:
Even more jaw-dropping is the AI-driven search. You can literally type anything – a person’s name (once it learns faces), an object, an action, a color, even a rough description – and Immich will find matching photos. It’s using machine-learning models under the hood (CLIP) so you can do freeform searches without painstaking tags. For instance, on the demo website, I searched for “seated” and voilà, Immich pulled up the seated photos:
Ditching the Cloud for Local Ownership
Here’s the kicker: I’ve been itching for a reason to finally cut the cord on most of the big cloud companies. I love having automatic photo backups, but I hate paying subscription fees and wondering where my data really lives.
Immich seems like at least part of a possible solution to migrate media into my own network. I can set it up in my home lab and have my phone upload photos to it over Wi-Fi. Immich supports videos and large libraries, so it’s a true replacement for the big services.
Why You Should Check It Out
Immich has all the photo/video features most of us look for, wrapped in a sleek, actively developed package. No monthly fees. No surrendering your entire media library to Big Tech just for convenience.
If you’ve ever talked about owning your data, managing your own media library, or building a NAS setup worth the effort, Immich deserves your attention.
Like I said, I somehow missed this. Maybe you did too. So yeah, go take a look: immich.app.
And if you’re already using it, like many users on /r/selfhosted, or planning to spin it up soon, drop a note. I’d love to hear how it works out for others.
