Immich
FreeGoogle Photos on your own disk, with your disk as the storage limit
A self-hosted photo and video backup service. The mobile app uploads automatically, the web app browses by timeline, and it does face grouping, map views, search by image content, deduplication and shared albums for multiple users — all running locally, with no ads, no storage caps and no quality reduction.
Why we picked it
Many people only realize a decade of photos is held hostage when the free Google Photos quota runs out. Immich is currently the most complete self-hosted replacement: 110,470 stars, AGPL-3.0, and an experience remarkably close to the commercial product — which is rare in self-hosted software.
The parts that feel most like Google Photos in daily use:
- Automatic background backup from the mobile app, restricted to Wi-Fi if you like, on both iOS and Android, uploading originals with no recompression.
- Face recognition groups photos by person automatically; you just name each face and can then search by person.
- Semantic search: type "beach", "birthday cake" or "red car" and it finds them by understanding image content through a machine-learning model — no manual tagging. That model runs on your own server, so the photos never leave.
- Map views, duplicate detection, and per-user libraries with shared albums are all present.
Deployment is via official Docker Compose — one configuration file brings it up, and the docs are clear. Hardware demands are higher than Nextcloud's, since the machine-learning side wants memory and CPU: plan on at least 4 GB of RAM, and a large disk if your library is big.
One caveat: it iterates quickly (currently v3.1.0, with releases close to monthly). The project has reached maturity, but still read the release notes before upgrading and — this holds for any self-hosted service — take backups seriously. Self-hosting means the data is yours, which also means nobody else is responsible when it is lost. For photos specifically, keep at least one offsite or offline copy.