A developer named Alex Tran reportedly built Immich after growing frustrated with paying Google for cloud storage to keep family photos, eventually creating what has become one of the fastest-growing self-hosted photo platforms on GitHub.
The project has now surpassed 98,000 GitHub stars and positions itself as a full alternative to Google Photos, offering face recognition, AI-powered search, automatic backups, and mobile apps while keeping photo libraries fully under user control.
Repo: Immich GitHub
Immich is designed for users who want full ownership of their personal photo libraries, addressing concerns around rising cloud storage costs and privacy by providing a self-hosted alternative to mainstream photo services.
The platform has gained strong traction among self-hosting and homelab communities, where users increasingly prefer local infrastructure over subscription-based cloud products.
Community reactions highlight both enthusiasm and feature requests.
“Immich is an insanely powerful and feature rich photo hosting program that is FREE.
As far as I’m concerned they can operate however they want. If you don’t like it, build the solution yourself.
OR what would be even better is build the solution and then send it to them for implementation.”
said u/Aretebeliever
“Honestly I could see how they see this as more of a power user tool. I really like how beginner-friendly immich is and certainly wouldn’t expect people in my family to use features like this. I personally haven’t used immich power tools, but maybe this is a request they would be open for? Anyways it’s always great to see people share their ideas and workflows so don’t get discouraged about sharing your process.”
said u/MrMoon0_o
“Been using Immich for a few weeks now, really liking it.
Could we have a ‘is this the same person’ check when tagging faces? I’ve got a few photos of the same person but immich picks it up as two different people.
I can’t seem to find a way to say ‘hey, these two people are the same people’
Even when entering the same name it saves it as two different names.”
said u/locvez
