It seemed like Immich came out of nowhere, but suddenly all my colleagues appear to be using it. I’m not as into self-hosting as some of them, so perhaps that’s why I’m surprised, but the more I look into it, the more obvious it seems that this photo management solution is turning into a sleeper hit.

The question is: why? At first glance Immich doesn’t seem to be all that, but there’s a reason (or five) people are dropping their cloud subscriptions in favor of managing their own digital photo collections.

It actually feels like Google Photos

Imitation, flattery, and all that jazz

I did a roundup of the services we’ve left for open-source alternatives not too long ago, and Immich was high on the list not only because of how polished it is, but how boldly it emulates the look, feel, and operation of Google Photos.

Now, Google Photos is probably the most widely used photo management app in the world, given that its 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 that’s always worth copying.

Immich is basically a Trojan horse helping you slip into self-hosting without feeling like you’re giving up polished, commercial software. In other words, and I mean this in the kindest way, it doesn’t feel like typical open-source software.

It solves the hardest problem: automatic phone backups

Trust is what matters most

Credit: Immich

While I personally love the AI search aspect of Google Photos, and it helps me find the right images in the tens of thousands of photos I’ve taken since the service launched, that’s never been the main value proposition.

It’s that any photos I take with my phone get automatically backed up to the cloud as soon as it has a network connection. It’s become such a reliable expectation that I don’t even think about it anymore. I just take a photo and assume that it will be waiting in my Google Photos account the next time I check.

This is the one thing that Immich has to absolutely nail, or the whole thing would flop. Immich’s mobile apps largely eliminate that friction. Once configured, new photos and videos upload automatically in the background, giving you the same “set it and forget it” experience that Google perfected.

My colleague Patrick Campagnale ditched Google Photos and went all-in on Immich. As far as I can tell, that’s still the case. Although he’s got one of the most impressive homelabs I’ve seen, in his recounting of why he moved to Immich he does note that you don’t actually have to self-host Immich if you don’t want to. You can also host it in the cloud, but that does negate some of the privacy benefits of self-hosting.

It embraced AI without locking users into the cloud

The magic of machine learning

I know I said earlier that seamless automatic backups were more important than the fancy intelligent search function in Google Photos, 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 with a hat” isn’t just a nice bonus. For me at least, it’s the fastest 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’d still contain an enormous number of images.

Credit: Immich

This is a hard one, but Immich pulls it off. In its features documentation you can see how many different aspects of an image you can search. Reproduced verbatim here:

That means you’re still getting the “AI” features that are Google’s forte, but without the Google baggage. It’s no surprise 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 wasn’t a mainstream concern, and affordable home servers weren’t nearly as common.

Today, self-hosting is a fast-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’s a massive global self-hosting community, and Immich benefits from coming into the picture at just the right time for people to want something just like it. So, it’s the right tool, at the right time, and definitely at the right price.