Immich
App in the BluixApps catalog
What it is
Immich is the self-hosted Google Photos replacement — a high-performance photo and video management platform with mobile apps (iOS + Android), automatic phone backup, ML-based face recognition, object detection, smart search, and shared albums. Built for users who refuse to hand their family memories to Google.
Reached production-grade stability in 2025 with v1.x — the project that finally made "leave Google Photos" a non-painful migration.
What it's for
- Family photo archive — mobile auto-backup, server-side organization, browse decades of history
- Privacy-first photo storage — GDPR-compliant, on your own infrastructure, no telemetry
- Shared albums for events — weddings, vacations, school groups, without Meta / Google account
- AI search without cloud — "photos of dogs on a beach" via local CLIP model, no upload to Google
- Multi-user households — separate libraries with shared spaces
Who it's for
- Privacy-conscious families — Google Photos UX without giving Google ML access to your kids' photos
- Photographers & videographers — self-hosted asset library with RAW support, fast browsing of large archives
- Households with mixed iOS + Android — single backup target both platforms hit reliably
- Journalists, activists, gov staff — source-protection workflows where US cloud storage is a non-starter
- Storage-rich self-hosters — NAS or large-disk VPS owners wanting consumer-grade UI for personal media
Why teams pick Immich over alternatives
- Real mobile parity — iOS + Android native apps with auto-backup, not a half-baked web shell
- ML pipeline — face clustering, object detection, OCR, smart search via Open CLIP
- External library support — point at existing folder structures, no forced re-import
- Memories — "On this day", year reviews, photo carousels matching Google Photos UX
- Active development — weekly releases, ~50k+ GitHub stars
- AGPLv3 license — commercial use clear
Integrations
- Native mobile apps — iOS (App Store) + Android (Play Store + F-Droid) with auto-backup
- External libraries — read-only mount of existing
/photosfolder structures, no import needed - Object storage — S3-compatible backend for offloading originals (MinIO, Backblaze B2, R2, AWS S3)
- Identity — OAuth (Google, GitHub, Microsoft, Authelia, Authentik)
- Desktop sync — WebDAV protocol for any client (CyberDuck, FileZilla, native OS mounts)
- ML providers — local CLIP for object/face; optional Whisper for video transcription
- API — REST + WebSocket for custom integrations / scripts / dashboards
Notable users & community
- 50k+ GitHub stars (one of the top self-host project of 2024-2025)
- Featured constantly on r/selfhosted as "the project that made me leave Google Photos"
- Strong Discord, active reddit, regular release cadence with public roadmap
- Acquired by FUTO foundation (2024) — sustainable funding without compromising open-source
- Multi-language UI maintained by community across 20+ locales
Tips & operations
- Mobile auto-backup defaults to WiFi-only — explain to users to avoid mobile-data shock when phones backup gigabytes
- ML container CPU-only OK up to ~50k photos — beyond that, GPU acceleration (CUDA) becomes mandatory for tolerable face/object processing
- Use pgvecto.rs not pgvector — Immich >= 1.118 requires the pgvecto.rs Postgres extension; default Postgres image won't work
- External library = read-only mode — useful for legacy
/photosarchives mounted without import; doesn't risk modifying files - Backup hook covers DB only by default — opt-in for the upload volume (originals can be 100s of GB; sized differently from app-state)
- Enable HEIC transcoding — iPhone HEIC isn't browser-friendly; the ImageMagick fallback transcodes on demand if enabled
What we ship in BluixApps
- Docker compose: Immich server + ML container + Postgres (with pgvecto.rs) + Redis
- Pinned
ghcr.io/immich-app/immich-server:v1.123.0, weekly upstream tracking - Storage volume at
/usr/src/app/upload— sized per your VPS disk allocation - HTTPS via Let's Encrypt; mobile apps work via the same hostname
- Admin user with random password on first boot
- ML container runs CPU-friendly by default; GPU accel available on Dedicated tier
- Backup hook covers Postgres + the upload volume (the photo originals — opt-in due to size)
Get this app — pick a BluixApps plan
Same catalog. Scaling tenant isolation, white-label and support tier.
| Tier | Tenants | Catalog | Support | White-label | Monthly | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stacks | 1 | 19 curated stacks | Standard | — | $19/mo | DetailDeploy |
| Starter | 10 | Full catalog | Standard | +$15–25/mo | $49/mo | DetailDeploy |
| Pro | 25 | Full catalog | Priority bugfix | +$15–25/mo | $149/mo | DetailDeploy |
| Growth | 100 | Full catalog | Priority bugfix | +$15–25/mo | $349/mo | DetailDeploy |
| Scale | 500 | Full catalog | 7-day window | +$15–25/mo | $799/mo | DetailDeploy |
| Enterprise | Unlimited | Full catalog | Priority 7-day | Bundled | $1,499/mo | DetailDeploy |
