Immich photo management

Interface reference

What Immich is

Immich is a self-hosted photo and video backup platform designed as a direct alternative to Google Photos. It provides automatic mobile backup, AI-powered search, facial recognition, album sharing, timeline browsing and a polished web and mobile interface — all running on your own hardware with your own storage.

Unlike cloud photo services, Immich keeps every photo and video on hardware you control. There is no storage limit beyond your own disks, no compression, no training of external AI models on your images, and no risk of losing access if a vendor changes its terms or shuts down.

Why I run it

I run Immich because I want automatic phone photo backup without sending every family photo to Google or Apple. The mobile app backs up photos and videos over the local network (or via Tailscale when remote), and the web interface provides album management, search and sharing — all without any data leaving the lab.

Docker Compose

services:
  immich-server:
    image: ghcr.io/immich-app/immich-server:release
    container_name: immich-server
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "2283:2283"
    volumes:
      - /path/to/photos:/usr/src/app/upload
    environment:
      - DB_HOSTNAME=immich-db
      - DB_USERNAME=postgres
      - DB_PASSWORD=<DB_PASSWORD>
      - DB_DATABASE_NAME=immich
      - REDIS_HOSTNAME=immich-redis
    depends_on:
      - immich-db
      - immich-redis

  immich-machine-learning:
    image: ghcr.io/immich-app/immich-machine-learning:release
    container_name: immich-ml
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - ./model-cache:/cache

  immich-redis:
    image: redis:7-alpine
    container_name: immich-redis
    restart: unless-stopped

  immich-db:
    image: tensorchord/pgvecto-rs:pg16-v0.2.0
    container_name: immich-db
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=<DB_PASSWORD>
      - POSTGRES_USER=postgres
      - POSTGRES_DB=immich
    volumes:
      - ./db:/var/lib/postgresql/data

What this gives you

Private, unlimited photo backup with AI search, facial recognition and a mobile app that works exactly like Google Photos — except every image stays on your own hardware and nobody else can see, analyse or monetise your family photos.