Google Photos vs Immich: Self-Host Your Photo Library

Photos and videos are among the most personal and valuable digital assets a business holds. Product photography, event documentation, project site images, and marketing assets accumulate quickly. Google Photos handles them beautifully but stores everything on Google's servers. Immich gives you the same experience on your own infrastructure.

What Immich Does

Immich is a self-hosted photo and video management platform that closely mirrors Google Photos in features and user experience. It automatically backs up photos from iOS and Android devices, organizes them by date and location, and provides AI-powered search that finds photos by content: searching for documents, whiteboard, or certificate returns relevant results without manual tagging. It also includes facial recognition, duplicate detection, and shared albums.

Business Use Cases

• Construction and engineering firms: Archive site progress photos with automatic timeline organization
• Marketing teams: Centralize product photography and brand assets with searchable metadata
• Real estate: Store property photos organized by listing with shared albums for clients
• Event companies: Collect event photos from multiple team members into shared albums
• General business: Replace personal Google Photos accounts that employees use for work-related images

How It Compares to Google Photos

Feature completeness is surprisingly close. Immich supports automatic mobile backup, AI-powered semantic search, facial recognition, duplicate detection, shared albums with link sharing, RAW file support, and video playback with transcoding. What Immich does not have: Google's unlimited infrastructure for AI processing. Facial recognition and object detection run on your server's CPU or GPU. A server with adequate RAM and a modest GPU handles this for a small team without issues.

Deployment

Immich runs in Docker with PostgreSQL and Redis. For a small team, 4GB RAM and 50GB storage is a reasonable starting point. Storage grows with your photo library, and you can use your own file system, S3-compatible storage, or NFS mounts. VPS1 deploys Immich with automated mobile backup setup, encrypted off-site backup of the photo library, and optional SSO integration.