Last Updated or created 2026-08-17
I’m running this Google Photos alternative for a week now, and I am pleasantly suprised.
UPDATE: 20260817 …. 220000 Images now
UPDATE: Installed power-tools, python scripts to manipulate dates and immich-go
- Face detection : spot on
- Responsiveness : fast!, even with a large library
- Android uploads : it just works! (I used Nextcloud before)
- Movies : plays smoothly (there is a cast button for movies and images)
The face detection had only 1 mismatch in my library.
Negatives?
Well maybe album management, it could be better or more flexible
Some search tests:
- Food – indeed found food
- Rum – found drinks
(I changed search query to OCR, and it gave me images with the word RUM on it) ! - Dog – First ones are dogs indeed, after that other animals
- Smiling / Kissing works
- Hair/red/computer/music/comic
Amazing results!
Features (some)
- Docker instance for simple upgrades
- Facial Recognition
- Hardware Transcoding
- Hardware-Accelerated Machine Learning
- Reverse Geocoding (see below)
Lets copy the rest of my photo libary to this server.
(Storage is on a 10Gbit fiberoptic iSCSI device)
What features make Immich an effective alternative to Google Photos for managing a large photo library?
Opensource, own hosted (so no AI learning by google using YOUR data)
It is fast, object and OCR recognition are superb.
You can alter the way it looks using 3rd party tools.
You can use the metadata as YOU wish.