In short. Immich is an open-source, self-hosted photo and video management platform — a Google Photos alternative that runs entirely on your own server. Released under AGPL-3.0, it has passed 100,000 GitHub stars, backs up photos and videos automatically from mobile devices, and uses machine learning for face recognition and semantic search, all without your library ever leaving infrastructure you control.
What Immich Does
- Automatic mobile backup — the iOS and Android apps back up photos and videos in the background as soon as they’re taken.
- AI face recognition — groups photos by the people in them using on-server machine learning.
- Smart, CLIP-powered search — search your library with natural-language descriptions, not just filenames or tags.
- Shared albums — invite others to contribute to or view a shared album.
- Map view — browse photos geographically using embedded location data.
What’s New in Immich v3 (July 2026)
Immich v3 is a significant release, but the team has designed the upgrade to be breaking-change-free for most existing users — a real consideration for anyone running it as their primary photo library. Notable additions include a preview of workflow-style automation for library management tasks, real-time HLS video transcoding (quality can now switch on the fly instead of requiring pre-generated offline transcodes), and a redesigned mobile editor that brings non-destructive editing — cropping, rotating, and adjustments you can revisit or revert later — to the same feature level as the web editor.
Immich vs Google Photos: Key Differences
| Dimension | Immich | Google Photos |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Free, open source — you pay only for your own storage/server | Free tier limited; paid storage plans beyond that (from ~$1.99/month for 100 GB) |
| Data ownership | Your library stays on your own server | Stored on Google’s infrastructure |
| Feature parity | Face recognition, semantic search, map view, shared albums, RAW support | Comparable feature set, plus deeper integration with other Google products |
| Hardware requirement | A basic setup runs on ~4 GB RAM; 8 GB+ recommended for faster ML performance | None — fully managed |
Immich Alternatives Worth Knowing
Immich isn’t the only self-hosted photo option. PhotoPrism is a mature alternative with its own AI-tagging approach and a slightly different UI philosophy. Nextcloud Photos works well if you’re already running Nextcloud for file sync and want photos folded into the same instance rather than a dedicated app. Ente is a privacy-focused, end-to-end encrypted option with both a hosted and self-hostable path. For a dedicated VPS deployment built specifically around fast browsing and mobile backup, Immich remains the strongest all-around pick among the immich alternatives worth evaluating.
Why Run Immich on Contabo?
Immich’s machine learning workloads — face detection and CLIP-based search indexing in particular — benefit from RAM headroom well beyond the bare minimum. A Contabo Cloud VPS 8 (24 GB RAM, €14/month) gives the ML worker room to run comfortably alongside the main application and database, at Contabo’s RAM-per-Euro Core-line pricing. That RAM-per-Euro positioning has gotten more relevant recently: Hetzner’s June 2026 price adjustment raised its shared-vCPU CX line — the closest comparison point for a workload like this — by roughly 30–40% for new orders, on top of far steeper increases (100%+) on Hetzner’s dedicated-vCPU CCX and CPX lines.
FAQ: Immich
Yes. Immich is completely free and open-source under the AGPL-3.0 license, with no paid tier, no premium features behind a paywall, and no cloud service to subscribe to. Your only cost is the server or storage you run it on.
The Immich server needs to be reachable for the mobile apps to back up and sync automatically, but since it’s self-hosted, that can mean your own local network rather than the public internet — you don’t need an internet-facing server if you only ever access it from home. For access away from home, you’d need to expose the server (via a reverse proxy, VPN, or similar) or rely on manual sync when back on the local network.
The strongest immich alternatives are PhotoPrism (mature, its own AI-tagging approach), Nextcloud Photos (best if you already run Nextcloud), and Ente (privacy-focused with end-to-end encryption). Each trades off differently on maturity, integration, and privacy model, but Immich remains the most actively developed and feature-complete option for a dedicated VPS deployment.
A basic Immich docker deployment runs on around 4 GB of RAM. For better machine-learning performance — faster face recognition and search indexing, especially on larger libraries — 8 GB or more is recommended. Immich also supports hardware-accelerated transcoding via Intel Quick Sync, NVIDIA GPUs, or VA-API, which reduces CPU load during video processing.
