Unless you actually go through the "Backing up your photos" step, you _will_ lose your photos, it's just a matter of time. And if you're like most people, that is probably not acceptable.
And by the time you do the math for the cost of your backups, you'll find Google Photos pricing is actually pretty good.
Absolutely. I pay Borgbase $10 a month (about). I could probably get a huge storage limit in Google for that money.
But it's worth it to me to be answerable to no one. I can't, say, sign in to my Google account with an unlocked phone and get banned. Boom, photos gone, no matter how many backups Google made on my behalf. And if I'm gonna do a "takeout" every month and back that up; might as well host myself. Immich is also absolutely amazing software.
Yeah. I actually love Google Photos as a product. I just want Immich as a safety net in case Google ever feels like locking me out of my account on a random Tuesday.
I haven't really found a guide or discussions on how best to use Immich in this mirroring way. Admittedly, I haven't looked very hard. Setting up Immich is something that's been on my todo list for years now.
In my case: I did the math and it would take me ~4-5 years to recoup the initial investment (of about $450) in my homelab (comparing my server + 3 copies of 2TB with the cost of a 2TB google drive subscription). (Also excludes the time spent building the server, and I found very good deals; if you get a regular NAS this becomes about ~10 years)
There is, however, a fixed component cost to building such a setup that gets amortized the more disks you buy- I believe it becomes worth it to use a NAS cost-wise over about ~5-6TB of data (and definitively worth it when you get into the tens of terabytes).
Or if you need low-latency storage / any type of performance - neither the cloud nor my homelab has removed my need for my portable NVMe drive
(The other benefit of having a homelab is, of course, you can run services that aren’t limited to cloud offerings and run processing on the data locally)
People setting up homelab often talk about money saved but never account for the time they have to spend as well not just in setting it up and maintainence. If you value your time, the cost of a google pro subscription is not much. I still run a homelab because I like it and yes its good to be able to run several services for "free" but the commitment is never free.
This is also true for businesses. I used to think why do companies don't use open source and save so much on infrastructure costs etc but in reality those costs don't really matter to them and self-hosting costs in terms of time and resources do add up + no gurantee as provided by enterprise level services etc.
I’d be shocked if anyone running a homelab was really saving much if any money. From personal experience, it has snowballed into a never ending science project of upgrading and tinkering which i enjoy but it probably costing me multiples of cloud subscriptions. I just find it fun and like to learn, and love to diy.
yes but there is still an opportunity cost. As I said I still do it because I like it but I also have a life outside just computers. Any time i spend on my homelab is also time I take away from other things. Also there is learning but a lot of the time is spent on doing menial system admin tasks or helping solve "user problems" (i.e. figure out why my partner's friend cannot access jellyfin anymore). So it does become a chore over time and there is always a cost. You can justify it by saying you are getting value out of it but in my experience, this is true for every activity. Everyone has limited time and spending it importantly is important to me.
This is exactly the reason why companies aren't just going to vibe-code their own software. It's more expensive to maintain than it is just to pay for it outright
The way I see it, I am committing more time and hassle to setup my homelab now to save time, money, and hassle later when the SaaS alternate's inevitably do something hostile to me as the user.
Even before AI coding I did not trust big tech companies to make updates that have my best interests in mind. Many of these examples are weird feature or ux changes - like how spotify treats liked songs as a playlist (requiring more taps to like a song). Not the end of the world. But on the more extreme side, my gaming PC's windows installation has died via bad windows update twice now. I don't use it for anything important anymore. It's insane that my claude code driven homelab stack has allowed me to have better uptime than github.
Now in the AI coding era, its obvious to me that alot of the tools I am forced to use on a day to day basis are frequently shipped with slop, causing more bugs and all around jankier UX's. With my claude max subscription, im suddenly able to make tools perfectly tailored to what I want, and I can rest assured I wont wake up and find the equivalent of a bad IOS update.
yes makes sense but don't you think that risk will also extend to OSS? I get there's more freedom and people can always fork but I have experienced several open source projects go to garbage as well and forced me to switch to another service.
And yes Google had gotten progressively every year that I have been a paying customer as well so I am not against your point either. All I am saying is sometimes cloud makes sense financially as well even though open source allows you to do it for free technically. Enshiftication is the word of our age for everything imo unfortunately
Yes I would consider my system optimal in terms of backup process etc. But I still tinker with it, try out new things, maintain the machines itself, it is a hobby. And it does consume time for me at least. But either way, I am sure a google pro subscription is still cheaper for me than the time value of setting up and maintainence, in the sense we are talking about saving money in real terms
Yes, but it's hard. I've not found something that works well with glacier, because most backup solutions want to write state, modify files immediately, etc, and glacier can't do that. It would need to be an append-only backup; strictly.
I do a bit of a hybrid. Borg to expensive, always available storage, but really large stuff that rarely changes and is less important, I exclude and manually throw in glacier once a year or so. Think, all your blue-ray rips, etc.
I love immich! On board since June 2026. But, here's a brief report on my evening installation project.. setting up Immich: Ingesting a 1.7TB library (160k+ RAW photos) is apparently not a standard task!
- Thumbnails and ML vectors consumed hundreds of gigabytes. I had to move the library folder to a dedicated ZFS HDD (700GB currently).
- ImageMagick uses 20GB RAM per Nikon RAW file (this triggered the Linux OOM-killer)
- Container crashes filled the OS drive with 2GB _per_ core dump.
I added `ulimits: core: 0` to the `docker-compose.yml` to stop core dumps and increased VM RAM to 48GB. I also added the following `.env` tweaks:
Great project but I believe Google Photos pricing is quite reasonable and alluring.
I've always considered using something like this but the fact that it's backed up locally (to backup on cloud I have to pay for another service) and not accessible to my family kind of puts me off from setting up something like this
Google Photos is a great value proposition, but it's still only 1 copy in 1 medium. If you count your phone as another copy/medium you still need a 3rd copy somewhere if you want to follow the 3-2-1 backup strategy.
> not accessible to my family
My family has no trouble with it, the UX is excellent. My retirement age parents are regularly adding photos to shared albums and things like that.
It is possible in general, but almost everybody doing self hosting (and as outlined in the article) does it on a local network and not on the internet. Most people that self host don't want to have to be a sysadmin in their free time in order to have a reasonable risk of not leaking all your families photos to the internet.
I made the jump to Immich a month ago after having to prune my Drive more and more often as my free Drive quota ran totally out after 8 years of freeloading.
My homelab had spare capacity and I had already offsite backups to Hetzner Storage Box sorted out so it didn't take long or increase my costs.
Very good experience so far. I moved all my photos including multiple complete wedding albums to it, something I couldn't do with Drive without "converting". Nice to finally have all the Google Photos goodies for everything.
Shout out to immich-go, a cli tool for bulk uploads from Google takeout archives.
> The ability to upload photos from your device automatically
I don't think the article actually covers this; they mention installing the immich app on your device and uploading a photo, but it's not at all clear that this will automatically back up all photos taken on your phone.
It does and it’s seamless for me. Which takes the angst out of “should I keep this photo or video” once your phone is old and full out of the equation.
Easy read but indeed. That's what I read the article for. I'm very happy with Photoprism but the box is not always on and I'd like to keep a cached set of photos on my phone while also having automatic (multi-user) sync whenever the box is available..
I love this project — I replaced Apple photos with it and it's been smooth sailing the whole way through. I have a public proxy sitting in front of it as well (which it makes easy by letting you configure external sharing URLs), so I can share out password-protected or public galleries and accept uploads without exposing it directly.
It drives me crazy that it shards your photos all over the place in opaquely named directories so you can’t actually find anything without its database index.
Photoprism is the best one I’ve found that will just take and index your folders as they are.
https://docs.immich.app/administration/storage-template/ is their best attempt to address your concern, but honestly I'm fine with navigating my photos solely using immich. (with annual backup copy stored in cold cloud storage)
I believe that's a setting, you can have it store the files in a more predictable directory hierarchy. Though it's better to make that choice early on before doing a lot of imports.
I switched earlier this year and it has been really good. Exporting and uploading your google photos is a little time consuming because of the size, but other than that pretty pain free.
After using it for a while I actually prefer it to google photos and think it does quite a few things better. I would recommend switching for sure.
One of the coolest things I've discovered with Immich is you can share an album link with a group of friends and they can all upload and download photos to/from that album without creating an account. It's way lower friction than anything else for sharing pics from a group activity or party or whatever.
I’m currently using Photos Mobile with Synology but planning to setup Immich soon. The article doesn’t cover sharing which is the one hiccup in all this. Apple makes it so easy to share galleries and I don’t want to expose my NAS. Cost wise it’s close to parity if you backup offsite. But worth it to move out of their ecosystem. I literally did not have some of my original files since apple shifts things off disk to preserve storage space.
Yeah, sharing is one of the big problems with Immich. You either need to expose your whole instance to make share links publicly accessible (and there's no way to secure user accounts with 2FA), or create user accounts for the people you want to share with and/or invite them and set up your VPN for them to access the shares.
There's https://github.com/alangrainger/immich-public-proxy, which is a weird workaround (it's a separate gallery frontend that syncs with your instance to only expose this specific service, so you can keep your Immich instane private).
Is there a way to sponsor a feature request to improve the sharing and user auth story? Passkeys could be used here (versus MFA/2FA), because if the passkey is lost, you can simply delete it and have the known user go through the onboarding flow again to create a new passkey.
As a retired semi-professional photographer I find it amazing how many photos some people have in their library. A mother with over 200GB of photos, 80% are junk, repeats, etc. She never looks at them either.
Most people would not need the storage they are using if the just took less photographs and edited more, but good on Immich.
Followed by 300 lines of obscure config commands and server configuration. Great...
My solution: I connect my iPhone once or twice a year and import my photos to a folder on my hard drive. Then I delete the old photos from the phone. That has worked fine for a couple of decades now.
Or you can use iCloud or Google Photos, which is about one dollar per month.
Horses for courses, but you’re comparing your best-case scenario to a worst-case Immich scenario. Admittedly I had a home lab box for it and am technical, but my effort was essentially pointing Claude at the Docker image and remembering a port number for setting up my phone.
Your solution, as presented, assumes you don’t lose any photos in six months and never go above the 2gb or so of space you get for a dollar. The impetus to finally set up Immich came from my wife pushing past that. Even at fifty cents a GB forever, it’s not going to scale as well as essentially 0, though that depends on considering the drive as a sunk cost.
And now I finally have to suck it up and establish an off-site backup plan to make my scenario like for like. Damn you!
Neither of your proposed solutions are really similar to Immich, the first is certainly private and secure, but you don't get many of the conviniences like location-based search, automatic face/object tagging, automatic OCR, etc.
Your second solution is much closer to Immich in terms of feature set, but (AFAIK) costs a bit more than 1$/month, depending on how much data you have. And it also doesn't match the privacy you'd get with Immich. Google will happily run your private photos through whatever AI model they feel like, without your permission or consent.
I'm not saying your solutions aren't good, if it works for you then great! But they're not really something you can compare to having an Immich instance
I don't understand these types of comments. It's clear you don't value the features Immich provides. Can you not imagine someone else valuing them?
What are you trying to communicate to us? Maybe you are just trying to tell people that they can get away with simpler solution if all they care about is unscheduled photo backup. If so, I feel there is a less antagonistic way for you to say it.
The only thing I wanted to communicate is that "easier than ever" shouldn't be anywhere in the article. Neither should really the part about saving money, but others have mentioned it, so I don't have to.
Otherwise I think Immich seems like a cool project, and I hope they're successful.
I added the part about putting photos in a folder, to at least contribute with a different solution, which for me has worked very well for very long.
Unless you actually go through the "Backing up your photos" step, you _will_ lose your photos, it's just a matter of time. And if you're like most people, that is probably not acceptable.
And by the time you do the math for the cost of your backups, you'll find Google Photos pricing is actually pretty good.
Still worth it, imo.
But it's worth it to me to be answerable to no one. I can't, say, sign in to my Google account with an unlocked phone and get banned. Boom, photos gone, no matter how many backups Google made on my behalf. And if I'm gonna do a "takeout" every month and back that up; might as well host myself. Immich is also absolutely amazing software.
I haven't really found a guide or discussions on how best to use Immich in this mirroring way. Admittedly, I haven't looked very hard. Setting up Immich is something that's been on my todo list for years now.
There is, however, a fixed component cost to building such a setup that gets amortized the more disks you buy- I believe it becomes worth it to use a NAS cost-wise over about ~5-6TB of data (and definitively worth it when you get into the tens of terabytes).
Or if you need low-latency storage / any type of performance - neither the cloud nor my homelab has removed my need for my portable NVMe drive
This is also true for businesses. I used to think why do companies don't use open source and save so much on infrastructure costs etc but in reality those costs don't really matter to them and self-hosting costs in terms of time and resources do add up + no gurantee as provided by enterprise level services etc.
Even before AI coding I did not trust big tech companies to make updates that have my best interests in mind. Many of these examples are weird feature or ux changes - like how spotify treats liked songs as a playlist (requiring more taps to like a song). Not the end of the world. But on the more extreme side, my gaming PC's windows installation has died via bad windows update twice now. I don't use it for anything important anymore. It's insane that my claude code driven homelab stack has allowed me to have better uptime than github.
Now in the AI coding era, its obvious to me that alot of the tools I am forced to use on a day to day basis are frequently shipped with slop, causing more bugs and all around jankier UX's. With my claude max subscription, im suddenly able to make tools perfectly tailored to what I want, and I can rest assured I wont wake up and find the equivalent of a bad IOS update.
And yes Google had gotten progressively every year that I have been a paying customer as well so I am not against your point either. All I am saying is sometimes cloud makes sense financially as well even though open source allows you to do it for free technically. Enshiftication is the word of our age for everything imo unfortunately
Tip: export the takeout to Google drive then download it from there.
Otherwise link downloads have # of times you can retry before they are deleted.
Looking back now it is no big deal. My burden has lessened and i am still the same man I was.
I do a bit of a hybrid. Borg to expensive, always available storage, but really large stuff that rarely changes and is less important, I exclude and manually throw in glacier once a year or so. Think, all your blue-ray rips, etc.
- Thumbnails and ML vectors consumed hundreds of gigabytes. I had to move the library folder to a dedicated ZFS HDD (700GB currently).
- ImageMagick uses 20GB RAM per Nikon RAW file (this triggered the Linux OOM-killer)
- Container crashes filled the OS drive with 2GB _per_ core dump.
I added `ulimits: core: 0` to the `docker-compose.yml` to stop core dumps and increased VM RAM to 48GB. I also added the following `.env` tweaks:
Also, make sure to limit max logging size in `docker-compose.yml` - this alone cleared up 17GB of logs that were generated in just 4 hours for me: Then, setup offsite backups with sanoid/syncoid zfs snapshots in pull zero-trust-mode (next evening project :)I've always considered using something like this but the fact that it's backed up locally (to backup on cloud I have to pay for another service) and not accessible to my family kind of puts me off from setting up something like this
> not accessible to my family
My family has no trouble with it, the UX is excellent. My retirement age parents are regularly adding photos to shared albums and things like that.
I wouldn't make the instance itself public, but I think this is a decent tradeoff. Of course still requires one to be a sysadmin.
My homelab had spare capacity and I had already offsite backups to Hetzner Storage Box sorted out so it didn't take long or increase my costs.
Very good experience so far. I moved all my photos including multiple complete wedding albums to it, something I couldn't do with Drive without "converting". Nice to finally have all the Google Photos goodies for everything.
Shout out to immich-go, a cli tool for bulk uploads from Google takeout archives.
I don't think the article actually covers this; they mention installing the immich app on your device and uploading a photo, but it's not at all clear that this will automatically back up all photos taken on your phone.
https://github.com/immich-app/immich
For the nerds...https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/my-ridiculously-robust-pho...
I just use Shotwell: https://shotwell-project.org/
Photoprism is the best one I’ve found that will just take and index your folders as they are.
Immich will also index your folders as they are. It’s called “External Libraries” in the documentation.
After using it for a while I actually prefer it to google photos and think it does quite a few things better. I would recommend switching for sure.
There's https://github.com/alangrainger/immich-public-proxy, which is a weird workaround (it's a separate gallery frontend that syncs with your instance to only expose this specific service, so you can keep your Immich instane private).
https://www.sam-brink.com/posts/self-host
Most people would not need the storage they are using if the just took less photographs and edited more, but good on Immich.
Followed by 300 lines of obscure config commands and server configuration. Great...
My solution: I connect my iPhone once or twice a year and import my photos to a folder on my hard drive. Then I delete the old photos from the phone. That has worked fine for a couple of decades now.
Or you can use iCloud or Google Photos, which is about one dollar per month.
Your solution, as presented, assumes you don’t lose any photos in six months and never go above the 2gb or so of space you get for a dollar. The impetus to finally set up Immich came from my wife pushing past that. Even at fifty cents a GB forever, it’s not going to scale as well as essentially 0, though that depends on considering the drive as a sunk cost.
And now I finally have to suck it up and establish an off-site backup plan to make my scenario like for like. Damn you!
Your second solution is much closer to Immich in terms of feature set, but (AFAIK) costs a bit more than 1$/month, depending on how much data you have. And it also doesn't match the privacy you'd get with Immich. Google will happily run your private photos through whatever AI model they feel like, without your permission or consent.
I'm not saying your solutions aren't good, if it works for you then great! But they're not really something you can compare to having an Immich instance
What are you trying to communicate to us? Maybe you are just trying to tell people that they can get away with simpler solution if all they care about is unscheduled photo backup. If so, I feel there is a less antagonistic way for you to say it.
Otherwise I think Immich seems like a cool project, and I hope they're successful.
I added the part about putting photos in a folder, to at least contribute with a different solution, which for me has worked very well for very long.