Immich

What hackers pick instead

• Google PhotosRecommended for automatic phone backup, searching photos by description or place, and organizing albums. Common caveat: pushy backup prompts and concerns about private photos being scanned by AI.73recommend
• Apple PhotosPeople recommend it for on-device search across huge libraries and reliable sync across Apple devices. Common caveat: iCloud upsell and frequent interface changes.66recommend
• PhotoPrismPeople recommend PhotoPrism for indexing existing photo folders as they are, without changing files, and for self-hosted photo sharing. The main caveat is a weaker phone app.10recommend
• digiKamRecommended for organizing, cataloging and tagging photo collections; it is open source and works fully offline.8recommend
• Nextcloud MemoriesRecommended for auto-uploading phone photos and videos to Nextcloud, with a fast gallery that cannot alter files. Critics say Immich is better and that it can be buggy and slow.5recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 488 comments. Each links to the original.

1. I think Immich is very good, and I use it myself. But there is something about the design and performance in the mobile app that still makes it feel "not quite there yet" on iOS at least.

   Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “Self-hosting my photos with Immich”

2. I've not actually had an issue with Immich ever while doing it this way and I manage about 10TB of photos and videos currently in Immich.

   Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Self-hosting my photos with Immich”

3. the thing I particularly enjoy about immich is that it's semantic searching is leagues better than any of the proprietary solutions

   Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage”

4. Immich put the joy back in photography for me, it's so easy to find anything, even with just searching with natural language.

   Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Self-hosting my photos with Immich”

5. I have not a single problem, which is quite incredible for a software that basically has all features that Google Photos has.

   Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Self-hosting my photos with Immich”

6. It is literally just start the container and forget. When upgrading it is change the version tag and restart the container.

   Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Self-hosting my photos with Immich”

7. I setup immich on my macbook to do this but sadly I found the face recognition is nowhere near as good as Google Photos.

   Mixed · Jul 2026 · in “Immich v3.0.0 Released”

8. Yes, it does silently and reliably upload all my photos to my server. That's like, the entire selling point of the app?

   Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Self-hosting my photos with Immich”

9. My only disappointment with this release is that the beta version of workflows does not have the ability to sort photos

   Mixed · Jul 2026 · in “Immich v3.0.0 Released”

10. my effort was essentially pointing Claude at the Docker image and remembering a port number for setting up my phone.

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage”

11. The Android app is good but does quite often fail to open, just getting stuck on the splash screen indefinitely.

    Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “Self-hosting my photos with Immich”

12. Immich has nice features like face detection, search by content, GPS, etc. but it is not suitable for front end.

    Mixed · Apr 2026 · in “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)”

13. the export failure wasn't incredibly loud. I don't think it notified and screamed at me that it wasn't working

    Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “Self-hosting my photos with Immich”

14. It's a fantastic self hosted replacement for Google photos. They have pretty much perfectly replicated the UI.

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Google Broke Its Promise to Me. Now ICE Has My Data”

15. The only thing that's really missing is a feature on the mobile app to delete local copies of uploaded assets

    Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “Self-hosting my photos with Immich”

16. Would be great if Immmich iOS app had a restore functionality as convenient as existing backup functionality.

    Mixed · Jul 2026 · in “Immich v3.0.0 Released”

17. When I'm pissed off by Immich or something better comes along, I destroy the Immich containers and it's gone.

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “My Ridiculously Robust Photo Management System (Immich Edition)”

18. I take a picture, and it’s nearly immediately available in the same way across all my devices and the web.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Self-hosting my photos with Immich”

19. I love this project — I replaced Apple photos with it and it's been smooth sailing the whole way through.

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage”

20. Immich is great, after doing this project I installed it for our current family photos and it works well

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “My Grandma Was a Fed – Lessons from Digitizing Hours of Childhood”

21. great to be able to just search for things in a photo and find any matches across dozens of TBs of raws

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Self-hosting my photos with Immich”

22. But it's not editor. You don't have manual export, you crop/rotate thumbnails which might not be suitable for print for example.

    Criticizes · Jul 2026 · in “Immich v3.0.0 Released”

23. they offer all bells and whistles while completely dropping the ball at making you feel those photos are well taken care of

    Criticizes · Jul 2026 · in “Immich v3.0.0 Released”

24. immich identifying things like statues or paintings as people, and not dealing with people (especially kids) aging

    Criticizes · Dec 2025 · in “Self-hosting my photos with Immich”

25. they do not make it easy to import from other servicesvlike Google Photos or iCloud, which should be a priority.

    Criticizes · Jul 2026 · in “Immich v3.0.0 Released”

26. Immich taking zero responsibility for possibly causing damages in hundreds of dollars and not warning their uses

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “VTT Test Donut Lab Battery Reaches 80% Charge in Under 10 Minutes [pdf]”

27. has outstanding, 2 y/o or so bugs that will fail to upload the Live Motion photos

    Criticizes · Jul 2026 · in “Immich v3.0.0 Released”

28. Immich has got to be the thing that I've spent ages setting up, use extremely infrequently but the one time a year I use it I'm so happy I did.

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Immich v3.0.0 Released”

29. Over the last couple of years hosting it I had a single issue with an upgrade but that was because I simply ignore the upgrade instructions

    Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “Self-hosting my photos with Immich”

30. Having e2e means my family members can rest assured that I or whoever I share admin rights with cannot look at their private photos.

    Mixed · Jul 2026 · in “Immich v3.0.0 Released”

31. setting up automatic backups and photo sync towards a self-hosted Immich/Photoprism instance is a lot easier on Android than on iOS

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Android and iPhone users can now share files, starting with the Pixel 10”

32. containerized version of Immich behind a containerized version of nginx proxy manager is probably as secure as you can get

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Self-hosting my photos with Immich”

33. I've always wanted a way to do certain operations locally like adding to an album before the photo/video is fully uploaded

    Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “Skip Is Now Free and Open Source”

34. Immich has automatic URL switching, so it detects which network it's on and select between the internal and external URLs.

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “How do I permanently disable Google Photos pop-up prompt to backup my photos?”

35. We as consumers just need to be more comfortable paying a little to have these services. Immich on a vps is not that much

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Now Google says it might use your Gmail and Google Photos data to target ads”

36. you don't get many of the conviniences like location-based search, automatic face/object tagging, automatic OCR, etc.

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage”

37. This means I can manage all my media assets myself without worrying about Immich accidentally corrupting them

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Immich v3.0.0 Released”

38. it's backed up locally (to backup on cloud I have to pay for another service) and not accessible to my family

    Mixed · Sep 2026 · in “Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage”

39. With Immich, I have to rely on the software still working or finding some kind of tool to dump the database.

    Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “Self-hosting my photos with Immich”

40. loads of hate for the bug-o-feature that disallows sharing of albums if the website is not hosted over HTTPS

    Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “The web server deployment model breaks at hobby scale”