What it is
Immich is a self-hosted photo and video library with the user experience of Google Photos — mobile auto-backup, ML-based search ("dog", "beach"), face grouping, map view, shared albums. The crucial difference is that the photos live on my hardware.
Why I run it
Google Photos is too convenient to refuse and too invasive to fully embrace. Immich gives me the same workflow — open the camera roll, photos automatically upload to my own server — without paying for storage that I already have, and without the photos being training data.
The Immich app on the phone is good enough that the experience competes with the major cloud services. Auto-backup, "memories" notifications, face recognition, semantic search — all the things that make a photo library actually usable, all running locally.
How I use it
The mobile app does the auto-backup; the web UI is where I browse on a real screen. The library currently holds a few thousand photos and a few hundred videos. ML-based search works well enough that I use it as the default — "show me beach photos from 2024" turns out to be faster than scrolling.
Sharing happens via shared albums with links; no public surface, all access goes through Tailscale when I'm away from home.