Immich

Last reviewed Aug 22, 2026 · 802 words

Immich is the best self-hosted Google Photos replacement you can run today, and the most demanding one. Plan for 4 GB of RAM, pin your version, and treat the database with respect, and it will quietly back up every photo your household takes. Skip those three things and you will eventually be restoring from backup — or worse, not restoring, because you never took one.

How much hardware does Immich actually need?

The catalogue lists 2 GB as the minimum, and that is a true minimum, not a recommendation. The stack is four containers: the server, a machine-learning service, PostgreSQL with a vector extension, and Redis. On 2 GB the ML container will get OOM-killed during the first big import. My working numbers, from running it for a family of four with roughly 90,000 assets:

Any Intel mini PC from the last eight years handles this. A Raspberry Pi 4 technically works but the initial ML pass over a large library can take days. Storage is the real cost: budget your current photo library size plus 30% a year, on a disk you can grow.

Use the official compose file, not a copied one

Immich is unusual among self-hosted apps: the compose stack changes between releases. The Postgres image, the ML service, and environment variables have all shifted over the project's life. Download the docker-compose.yml and .env that ship with each release from the official install docs instead of reusing one from a blog post or an old deployment.

Two lines in .env matter more than the rest:

# pin the release - never use latest for Immich
IMMICH_VERSION=v1.135.0
# on a disk with room to grow
UPLOAD_LOCATION=/srv/immich/library

Pinning matters because Immich still ships breaking changes. The project is honest about this — release notes flag them clearly — but latest plus an automated puller like Watchtower is how people end up with a server that will not start at 7 a.m. Read the notes, then bump the pin. Once a month is a fine cadence; my longer thoughts on that workflow are in container updates without fires.

The settings that separate a demo from a daily driver

• Set the upload size limit on your reverse proxy. Immich accepts multi-gigabyte videos; a default nginx client_max_body_size of 1 MB fails every phone video silently. 5000 MB is a sane ceiling.
• Turn on the storage template (Settings → Storage Template) before importing, so originals land in YYYY/MM folders. Your library stays legible outside Immich, which matters the day you migrate away.
• Create one user per person, not one shared login. Partner-sharing and face recognition both work better, and you can see whose phone stopped backing up.
• Leave the ML service enabled even on weak hardware. Smart search ("beach 2019", "receipts") is the single feature that makes Immich feel like Google Photos rather than a folder of files.

Backups: the database and the files are one unit

Immich's originals live on disk, but albums, faces, edits, and users live in Postgres. Backing up one without the other gives you a pile of files and no library. Nightly, in this order: pg_dumpall from the database container, then the upload location, off the machine. The 3-2-1 backup approach applies with no modifications, and the phone is not a backup — once the app confirms upload, many people delete local copies, which makes your server the only copy on earth.

Who should pick something else

If your hardware tops out at 2 GB of RAM, or you want an install you never think about, PhotoPrism indexes an existing folder structure without demanding a multi-container stack, and the full trade-offs are in our Immich vs PhotoPrism comparison. If you only want photo files synced off your phone and no web timeline at all, Syncthing does that with 128 MB of RAM.

What I'd do

Buy a used mini PC with 8 GB of RAM and a 2 TB SSD, install the official compose stack with the version pinned, set the storage template, and point every phone in the house at it the same evening. Schedule the Postgres dump before you import your first photo, not after. Immich rewards exactly one thing: treating it like the primary copy of your family's memories, because that is what it becomes.