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How to Self-Host Immich 2026

·OSSAlt Team
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TL;DR

Immich (AGPL 3.0, ~55K GitHub stars, TypeScript + Go) is the fastest-growing self-hosted Google Photos replacement — purpose-built for automatic mobile backup with a near-identical UX. The iOS and Android apps run in the background and upload photos/videos as you take them. AI features (face recognition, scene detection, CLIP semantic search) run locally. Google Photos charges $2.99/month for 100GB; Immich is free and stores on your hardware. Compare Immich vs PhotoPrism: Immich has better mobile backup and faster UI; PhotoPrism has more mature AI classification and batch operations.

Key Takeaways

  • Immich: AGPL 3.0, ~55K stars — Google Photos-equivalent UX, best mobile backup
  • Automatic backup: iOS/Android apps silently backup in background (like Google Photos)
  • Machine learning: Face clustering, CLIP semantic search ("sunset over mountains")
  • Shared albums: Create albums and invite family/friends with a link
  • Memory lane: Shows "On this day" photos from past years
  • Active development: Releases weekly — fastest-moving self-hosted photo project

Immich vs PhotoPrism vs Google Photos

FeatureImmichPhotoPrismGoogle Photos
LicenseAGPL 3.0AGPL 3.0Proprietary
CostFreeFree$2.99/mo (100GB)
Mobile backup appYes (iOS + Android)No (3rd party)Yes
Background syncYes (automatic)Manual/3rd partyYes
Face recognitionYesYesYes
CLIP semantic searchYesNoYes
Scene classificationBasic1000+ labelsYes
Shared albumsYesYesYes
Memory laneYesNoYes
Duplicate detectionYesYesYes
Video transcodingYesYesYes
GitHub Stars~55K~34K—

Part 1: Docker Setup

# docker-compose.yml
name: immich

services:
  immich-server:
    container_name: immich_server
    image: ghcr.io/immich-app/immich-server:${IMMICH_VERSION:-release}
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - ${UPLOAD_LOCATION}:/usr/src/app/upload
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
    env_file:
      - .env
    ports:
      - "2283:2283"
    depends_on:
      - redis
      - database
    healthcheck:
      disable: false

  immich-machine-learning:
    container_name: immich_machine_learning
    image: ghcr.io/immich-app/immich-machine-learning:${IMMICH_VERSION:-release}
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - model-cache:/cache
    env_file:
      - .env
    healthcheck:
      disable: false

  redis:
    container_name: immich_redis
    image: docker.io/redis:6.2-alpine@sha256:148bb5ac8be21ac54f6bb42d3c4af0c8cfbae44e6ec8f5bfa33a80dd79a14f9d
    restart: always
    healthcheck:
      test: redis-cli ping || exit 1

  database:
    container_name: immich_postgres
    image: docker.io/tensorchord/pgvecto-rs:pg14-v0.2.0@sha256:90724186f0a3517cf6914295b5ab410db9ce23190a2d9d0b9dd6463e3fa298f0
    restart: always
    environment:
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: ${DB_PASSWORD}
      POSTGRES_USER: ${DB_USERNAME}
      POSTGRES_DB: ${DB_DATABASE_NAME}
      POSTGRES_INITDB_ARGS: "--data-checksums"
    volumes:
      - postgres_data:/var/lib/postgresql/data
    healthcheck:
      test: >-
        pg_isready --dbname='${DB_DATABASE_NAME}' --username='${DB_USERNAME}' || exit 1;
        Chksum="$$(psql --dbname='${DB_DATABASE_NAME}' --username='${DB_USERNAME}' --tuples-only --no-align
        --command='SELECT COALESCE(SUM(checksum_failures), 0) FROM pg_stat_database')";
        echo "checksum failure count - $Chksum";
        [ "$Chksum" = '0' ] || exit 1
      interval: 5m
      start_interval: 30s
      start_period: 5m

volumes:
  model-cache:
  postgres_data:

# .env
UPLOAD_LOCATION=/path/to/your/photos    # Where photos are stored on host
IMMICH_VERSION=release
DB_PASSWORD=your-secure-db-password
DB_USERNAME=postgres
DB_DATABASE_NAME=immich
REDIS_HOSTNAME=redis

docker compose up -d

Visit http://your-server:2283 → create admin account.

Part 2: HTTPS with Caddy

photos.yourdomain.com {
    reverse_proxy localhost:2283
}

Part 3: Install Mobile App and Enable Backup

iOS

  1. Install Immich from App Store
  2. Open app → Server URL: https://photos.yourdomain.com
  3. Log in
  4. Backup tab → Enable Auto Backup
  5. Grant photo library access
  6. Immich backs up photos and videos silently in the background

Android

  1. Install Immich from Play Store or F-Droid
  2. Same setup as iOS
  3. Enable Background backup → Immich uploads automatically when on WiFi

Backup Settings

In the mobile app → Backup settings:

  • WiFi only: Recommended (prevents mobile data usage)
  • Background backup: Keep enabled
  • Video backup: Optional (large files)
  • Exclude albums: Exclude screenshots, WhatsApp images, etc.

Part 4: AI Features

Face Recognition

Immich clusters faces automatically — runs on the machine learning container:

  1. Explore → People — view auto-detected face clusters
  2. Click a cluster → Set name → "Alice"
  3. All photos of Alice are now searchable

Semantic Search (CLIP)

Immich uses CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining) for natural language photo search:

# Search examples in the search bar:
"birthday cake with candles"
"sunset over mountains"
"dog playing in snow"
"wedding ceremony outdoors"

No tags needed — the model understands photo content semantically.

Smart Albums

  1. Albums → + Create Album
  2. Or use Explore → People → [Person] to auto-populate a person's photos

Part 5: Sharing

Shared Albums

  1. Albums → [Album] → Share
  2. Add users (internal accounts) or generate a Public share link
  3. Public link: recipients can view/download without an account

Partner Sharing

Share your entire library with a partner:

  1. Settings → Sharing → Partner → Add partner
  2. They see all your photos in their app

Part 6: External Library (Without Re-uploading)

Point Immich at an existing photo directory without moving files:

# In docker-compose.yml, add to immich-server:
volumes:
  - ${UPLOAD_LOCATION}:/usr/src/app/upload
  - /path/to/existing/photos:/mnt/media/existing:ro    # Read-only external library

Then in Immich:

  1. Administration → External Libraries → Create External Library
  2. Path: /mnt/media/existing
  3. Click Scan Library — Immich indexes without copying

Part 7: Hardware Acceleration for ML

NVIDIA GPU

immich-machine-learning:
  image: ghcr.io/immich-app/immich-machine-learning:${IMMICH_VERSION:-release}-cuda
  deploy:
    resources:
      reservations:
        devices:
          - driver: nvidia
            count: 1
            capabilities: [gpu]

ARM / Apple Silicon

Use the ARM build — ML runs on CPU efficiently on M-series Macs or ARM servers:

immich-machine-learning:
  image: ghcr.io/immich-app/immich-machine-learning:${IMMICH_VERSION:-release}-armv8

Part 8: Memory Lane

Immich automatically creates "On this day" memories:

  • Opens the app → notifications for photos taken 1, 2, 3+ years ago today
  • Memories tab → swipe through past years like a story

Enable in: Settings → Notifications → Memories

Part 9: Duplicate Detection

Immich detects duplicate photos in your library:

  1. Administration → Utilities → Duplicate Detection
  2. Review detected duplicates side-by-side
  3. Trash duplicates with one click

Maintenance

# Update Immich (always use release tag, check changelogs):
docker compose pull
docker compose up -d

# WARNING: Breaking changes are common — read release notes before updating

# Check job queue status:
# Administration → Jobs → view active/completed jobs

# Backup database:
docker exec immich_postgres pg_dump -U postgres immich \
  | gzip > immich-db-$(date +%Y%m%d).sql.gz

# Backup uploads (photos):
# Just backup your ${UPLOAD_LOCATION} directory — original files live there

# Logs:
docker compose logs -f immich-server
docker compose logs -f immich-machine-learning

# Trigger full library scan:
# Administration → Jobs → Library → Run all

Why Self-Host Immich?

The case for self-hosting Immich comes down to three practical factors: data ownership, cost at scale, and operational control.

Data ownership is the fundamental argument. When you use a SaaS version of any tool, your data lives on someone else's infrastructure subject to their terms of service, their security practices, and their business continuity. If the vendor raises prices, gets acquired, changes API limits, or shuts down, you're left scrambling. Self-hosting Immich means your data and configuration stay on infrastructure you control — whether that's a VPS, a bare metal server, or a home lab.

Cost at scale matters once you move beyond individual use. Most SaaS equivalents charge per user or per data volume. A self-hosted instance on a $10-20/month VPS typically costs less than per-user SaaS pricing for teams of five or more — and the cost doesn't scale linearly with usage. One well-configured server handles dozens of users for a flat monthly fee.

Operational control is the third factor. The Docker Compose configuration above exposes every setting that commercial equivalents often hide behind enterprise plans: custom networking, environment variables, storage backends, and authentication integrations. You decide when to update, how to configure backups, and what access controls to apply.

The honest tradeoff: you're responsible for updates, backups, and availability. For teams running any production workloads, this is familiar territory. For individuals, the learning curve is real but the tooling (Docker, Caddy, automated backups) is well-documented and widely supported.

Server Requirements and Sizing

Before deploying Immich, assess your server capacity against expected workload.

Minimum viable setup: A 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM VPS with 20GB SSD is sufficient for personal use or small teams. Most consumer VPS providers — Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr — offer machines in this range for $5-10/month. Hetzner offers excellent price-to-performance for European and US regions.

Recommended production setup: 2 vCPUs with 4GB RAM and 40GB SSD handles most medium deployments without resource contention. This gives Immich headroom for background tasks, caching, and concurrent users while leaving capacity for other services on the same host.

Storage planning: The Docker volumes in this docker-compose.yml store all persistent Immich data. Estimate your storage growth rate early — for data-intensive tools, budget for 3-5x your initial estimate. Hetzner Cloud and Vultr both support online volume resizing without stopping your instance.

Operating system: Any modern 64-bit Linux distribution works. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and Debian 12 are the most commonly tested configurations. Ensure Docker Engine 24.0+ and Docker Compose v2 are installed — verify with docker --version and docker compose version. Avoid Docker Desktop on production Linux servers; it adds virtualization overhead and behaves differently from Docker Engine in ways that cause subtle networking issues.

Network: Only ports 80 and 443 need to be publicly accessible when running behind a reverse proxy. Internal service ports should be bound to localhost only. A minimal UFW firewall that blocks all inbound traffic except SSH, HTTP, and HTTPS is the single most effective security measure for a self-hosted server.

Backup and Disaster Recovery

Running Immich without a tested backup strategy is an unacceptable availability risk. Docker volumes are not automatically backed up — if you delete a volume or the host fails, data is gone with no recovery path.

What to back up: The named Docker volumes containing Immich's data (database files, user uploads, application state), your docker-compose.yml and any customized configuration files, and .env files containing secrets.

Backup approach: For simple setups, stop the container, archive the volume contents, then restart. For production environments where stopping causes disruption, use filesystem snapshots or database dump commands (PostgreSQL pg_dump, SQLite .backup, MySQL mysqldump) that produce consistent backups without downtime.

For a complete automated backup workflow that ships snapshots to S3-compatible object storage, see the Restic + Rclone backup guide. Restic handles deduplication and encryption; Rclone handles multi-destination uploads. The same setup works for any Docker volume.

Backup cadence: Daily backups to remote storage are a reasonable baseline for actively used tools. Use a 30-day retention window minimum — long enough to recover from mistakes discovered weeks later. For critical data, extend to 90 days and use a secondary destination.

Restore testing: A backup that has never been restored is a backup you cannot trust. Once a month, restore your Immich backup to a separate Docker Compose stack on different ports and verify the data is intact. This catches silent backup failures, script errors, and volume permission issues before they matter in a real recovery.

Security Hardening

Self-hosting means you are responsible for Immich's security posture. The Docker Compose setup provides a functional base; production deployments need additional hardening.

Always use a reverse proxy: Never expose Immich's internal port directly to the internet. The docker-compose.yml binds to localhost; Caddy or Nginx provides HTTPS termination. Direct HTTP access transmits credentials in plaintext. A reverse proxy also centralizes TLS management, rate limiting, and access logging.

Strong credentials: Change default passwords immediately after first login. For secrets in docker-compose environment variables, generate random values with openssl rand -base64 32 rather than reusing existing passwords.

Firewall configuration:

ufw default deny incoming
ufw allow 22/tcp
ufw allow 80/tcp
ufw allow 443/tcp
ufw enable

Internal service ports (databases, admin panels, internal APIs) should only be reachable from localhost or the Docker network, never directly from the internet.

Network isolation: Docker Compose named networks keep Immich's services isolated from other containers on the same host. Database containers should not share networks with containers that don't need direct database access.

VPN access for sensitive services: For internal-only tools, restricting access to a VPN adds a strong second layer. Headscale is an open source Tailscale control server that puts your self-hosted stack behind a WireGuard mesh, eliminating public internet exposure for internal tools.

Update discipline: Subscribe to Immich's GitHub releases page to receive security advisory notifications. Schedule a monthly maintenance window to pull updated images. Running outdated container images is the most common cause of self-hosted service compromises.

Troubleshooting Common Issues

Container exits immediately or won't start

Check logs first — they almost always explain the failure:

docker compose logs -f immich

Common causes: a missing required environment variable, a port already in use, or a volume permission error. Port conflicts appear as bind: address already in use. Find the conflicting process with ss -tlpn | grep PORT and either stop it or change Immich's port mapping in docker-compose.yml.

Cannot reach the web interface

Work through this checklist:

  1. Confirm the container is running: docker compose ps
  2. Test locally on the server: curl -I http://localhost:PORT
  3. If local access works but external doesn't, check your firewall: ufw status
  4. If using a reverse proxy, verify it's running and the config is valid: caddy validate --config /etc/caddy/Caddyfile

Permission errors on volume mounts

Some containers run as a non-root user. If the Docker volume is owned by root, the container process cannot write to it. Find the volume's host path with docker volume inspect VOLUME_NAME, check the tool's documentation for its expected UID, and apply correct ownership:

chown -R 1000:1000 /var/lib/docker/volumes/your_volume/_data

High resource usage over time

Memory or CPU growing continuously usually indicates unconfigured log rotation, an unbound cache, or accumulated data needing pruning. Check current usage with docker stats immich. Add resource limits in docker-compose.yml to prevent one container from starving others. For ongoing visibility into resource trends, deploy Prometheus + Grafana or Netdata.

Data disappears after container restart

Data stored in the container's writable layer — rather than a named volume — is lost when the container is removed or recreated. This happens when the volume mount path in docker-compose.yml doesn't match where the application writes data. Verify mount paths against the tool's documentation and correct the mapping. Named volumes persist across container removal; only docker compose down -v deletes them.

Keeping Immich Updated

Immich follows a regular release cadence. Staying current matters for security patches and compatibility. The update process with Docker Compose is straightforward:

docker compose pull          # Download updated images
docker compose up -d         # Restart with new images
docker image prune -f        # Remove old image layers (optional)

Read the changelog before major version updates. Some releases include database migrations or breaking configuration changes. For major version bumps, test in a staging environment first — run a copy of the service on different ports with the same volume data to validate the migration before touching production.

Version pinning: For stability, pin to a specific image tag in docker-compose.yml instead of latest. Update deliberately after reviewing the changelog. This trades automatic patch delivery for predictable behavior — the right call for business-critical services.

Post-update verification: After updating, confirm Immich is functioning correctly. Most services expose a /health endpoint that returns HTTP 200 — curl it from the server or monitor it with your uptime tool.

See all open source photo management tools at OSSAlt.com/categories/photos.

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