I Ditched Google Photos and Took My 40,000 Photos With Me

Google Photos was free for years and then it was not, and then they started using my photos to train their AI without asking, and I had forty thousand photos and videos in there, my entire life from the last decade including trips and everyday moments I wanted to keep. I could not just leave because I had invested years of memories in their ecosystem, but I also could not stay because I did not want my family photos used as training data for something I did not consent to.

Immich is what pulled me out and it is the fastest-growing self-hosted app of the past two years with a hundred thousand GitHub stars. It replaces Google Photos entirely and unlike Google it does not scan your images for advertising profiles. The reason Immich won where others failed is that the mobile app actually works. I tried PhotoPrism and the mobile experience was mediocre, I tried Nextcloud Photos and it was an afterthought in a larger suite. Immich’s app is genuinely good, it backs up in the background, it uses machine learning to tag faces and objects, it has shared albums, it works on iOS and Android. You install it, point it at your phone, and forget about it, just like Google Photos used to be.

Immich is more complex than a single container because it needs Postgres and Redis, but the official setup provides a docker-compose file and a dot-env file that you download from their GitHub releases page. You edit the dot-env file to set your upload location and database password, run docker compose up, and open port 2283. The first load takes a minute while Immich sets up its database schema, and then you create an admin account and install the mobile app.

The mobile app is where the magic happens. You enter your server URL, log in with your admin credentials, enable background backup, and new photos sync as you take them. The first backup of my forty thousand photos took about three days over WiFi because I had a decade of accumulated images, but after that new photos appear on my server within minutes.

Google lets you export your data through Google Takeout and Immich has a web-based import tool that handles the ZIP files directly. You select your files and Immich extracts them, preserves your albums, keeps the metadata intact, and imports everything. The import took about six hours on my ITX machine for forty thousand photos, but it worked perfectly with all albums preserved and all dates correct and all faces matched. The feeling of deleting my Google Photos account after the import completed was one of the most satisfying digital experiences I have had.

The machine learning features are what make Immich feel like magic. It runs entirely locally on your server, face detection groups photos by person, object detection lets you search by thing or place, scene classification groups by location type, and OCR searches for text inside images. The first scan is CPU-intensive and took about two days for my collection, but after that new photos are processed incrementally. The object search is the feature I use most, searching for car shows every photo with a car and searching for food shows every meal I took a picture of.

Shared albums work with external users who do not need an account. You create an album, click Share, get a link, send it to your family. They can view and download and even upload to the album. I use this for family events where everyone takes photos and we want them in one place without everyone needing a Google account.

Immich is the story of modern self-hosting for a reason. It solves a problem that millions of people have, the Google Photos lock-in, and does it with a product that is genuinely good. Your photos belong to you and Immich gives you a way to take them back.

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