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📸 Immich: Your Own Google Photos... but at Home (or in the Company)
R
Rodolfo Echenique
Automated Translation: This article was originally written in Spanish and translated by Gemini AI.
Tired of paying subscriptions for cloud services to store your photos? Worried about the privacy of your memories or the eternally changing terms and conditions of Google, Apple, or Amazon? Then Immich is one of those self-hosted software gems worth knowing.
🔍 What is Immich?
Immich is an open-source platform for managing your photos and videos. Imagine something similar to Google Photos, but hosted on your own server or NAS. It has support for:
- Facial recognition (integrated machine learning)
- Automatic albums
- Mobile uploads (iOS and Android)
- Modern and agile interface
All this, with the peace of mind that the data is under your control.
🏢 Does it apply in enterprise environments?
It may not seem like it, but yes. Architecture firms, design companies, real estate agencies, content agencies, or any organization that works with large volumes of photos/videos can use Immich as an internal gallery or centralized archive. With internal and controlled access, without relying on third parties or inflated subscriptions.
🚀 Advantages of using self-hosted Immich
- Savings: Eliminate monthly cloud storage expenses.
- Privacy: Your photos do not leave your network.
- Speed: Local storage = fewer loading times.
- Total control: You configure your backups, permissions, and upgrades.
- Integrated Machine Learning: Facial and object recognition without sending data to the cloud.
⚠️ Risks of self-hosted solutions
Not everything is rosy. These solutions demand technical responsibility:
- No backups = total loss. Redundancy is not optional.
- Hardware failure: If the disk holding the database dies, bye-bye photos.
- Manual updates: There is no Google team doing it for you.
Therefore, if you are going to implement Immich, make sure you have at least:
- Automatic backups (local + remote ideally)
- RAID or snapshots if your NAS allows it
- UPS for power outages
🔧 How to implement it? (Docker Compose + .env)
Here is an example ready to use in your homelab or enterprise server.
📄 docker-compose.yml
name: immich
services:
immich-server:
container_name: immich_server
image: ghcr.io/immich-app/immich-server:${IMMICH_VERSION:-release}
volumes:
- ${UPLOAD_LOCATION}:/usr/src/app/upload
env_file:
- .env
ports:
- '8002:2283'
depends_on:
- redis
- database
restart: always
immich-machine-learning:
container_name: immich_machine_learning
image: ghcr.io/immich-app/immich-machine-learning:${IMMICH_VERSION:-release}
volumes:
- ./model-cache:/cache
env_file:
- .env
restart: always
redis:
container_name: immich_redis
image: docker.io/valkey/valkey:8-bookworm
restart: always
database:
container_name: immich_postgres
image: ghcr.io/immich-app/postgres:14-vectorchord0.4.3-pgvectors0.2.0
environment:
POSTGRES_PASSWORD: ${DB_PASSWORD}
POSTGRES_USER: ${DB_USERNAME}
POSTGRES_DB: ${DB_DATABASE_NAME}
POSTGRES_INITDB_ARGS: '--data-checksums'
volumes:
- ${DB_DATA_LOCATION}:/var/lib/postgresql/data
restart: always
📄 .env example
# Immich version (can be release, main, or a specific tag)
IMMICH_VERSION=release
# Absolute path where you want to store photos/videos
UPLOAD_LOCATION=/mnt/storage/immich/uploads
# PostgreSQL database configuration
DB_USERNAME=immich
DB_PASSWORD=c0ntraS3gura!
DB_DATABASE_NAME=immich
DB_DATA_LOCATION=/mnt/storage/immich/db
Once configured, you can access Immich at (or from your server's IP). Mobile apps allow you to automatically upload photos just like Google Photos would, but without handing over your metadata to anyone.
http://localhost:8002🎯 Conclusion
Immich is a brilliant solution for those who value their privacy and want to stop depending on the cloud. It is not for anyone: it requires some technical knowledge and commitment to backups. But if you are setting up a serious homelab or an internal solution for your company, Immich can be the tool that frees you from the monopoly of tech giants.
Do you dare to take back control of your photos?
_Post created by a sysadmin with the soul of a paranoid photographer.-