It seemed like Immich came out of nowhere, but suddenly all my colleagues seem to be using it. I’m not as into self-hosting as some of them, so maybe that’s why I’m surprised, but the more I look at it, the more obvious it seems that this photo management solution is becoming an unexpected hit.
The question is: why? Prima facie immicha It doesn’t seem like all that, but there’s a reason (or five) why people are ditching their cloud subscriptions to manage their own digital photo collections.
It really feels like Google Photos
Imitation, adulation and all that jazz.
I made a summary of Services that we have left for open source alternatives. It wasn’t that long ago, and Immich was high on the list not only for how polished it is, but also for how boldly it emulates the look, feel, and function of Google Photos.
Now, Google Photos is probably the most used photo management app in the world, given that it’s on virtually every Android device, so 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 is always worth a copy.
Immich is basically a Trojan horse that helps you embrace self-hosting without feeling like you’re giving up polished commercial software. In other words, and I say this in the nicest way, no feel as typical open source software.
Solve the toughest problem: automatic phone backups
Trust is what matters most
While I personally love the AI search aspect of Google Photos and it helps me find the right images among the tens of thousands of photos I’ve taken since the service launched, that’s never been the main value proposition.
It’s just that 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 photo and assume it’ll be waiting in my Google Photos account the next time I check it.
This is the only thing that Immich absolutely has to specify, or everything would fail. Immich mobile apps largely eliminate that friction. Once set up, new photos and videos automatically load in the background, giving you the same “set it and forget it” experience that Google perfected.
My colleague Patrick Campagnale left Google Photos and he bet everything on Immich. As far as I can tell, that’s still the case. Although he has one of the most impressive homelabs I’ve seen, in his account of why he moved to Immich, he points out that you don’t actually need 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.
Adopted AI without locking users into the cloud
The magic of machine learning
I know I said before that perfect automatic backups were more important than Google Photos’ fancy smart search feature, 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” is not only a nice bonus. At least for me, it’s the quickest way to find the images I’m looking for. I’m notoriously bad at organizing my photos into albums, and even if I did, they would still contain a huge amount of images.
It’s difficult, but Immich does it. in your feature documentation You can see how many different aspects of an image you can search for. Reproduced verbatim here:
|
Guy |
Description |
|---|---|
|
People |
Faces that are recognized 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 of the original path. |
|
Description |
Description added to assets. |
|
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) |
Text on images |
|
Locations |
Cities, states and countries from reverse geocoding. |
|
Tags |
Tags assigned to or extracted from assets. |
|
Camera |
Make, model and model of lens. |
|
time period |
Start and end date of a specific time period |
|
Media type |
Image or video or both |
|
Display options |
In Archive, in Favorites or Not in any album |
|
Star rating |
User assigned star rating |
That means you still get the “AI” features that are Google’s forte, but without the Google baggage. It’s no surprise that people are flocking to Immich.
A decade ago, convincing people to self-host their photo library would have been a tough sell. Cloud storage was relatively cheap, privacy was not a widespread concern, and affordable home servers were not that common.
Today, self-hosting is a rapidly growing practice and some people don’t even realize they’re doing it because they don’t think of apps like Plex or Jellyfin in those terms. But there is a huge global self-hosting community, and Immich benefits from coming on the scene at just the right time for people to want something like this. So it’s the right tool, at the right time and definitely at the right price.
