Immich is self-hosted photo and video library software that you run on a server you manage. One household account describes using it after previously relying on OneDrive and Google Photos. The tradeoff is straightforward: you manage the server and its backups, too.
On this page
- What the library offers
- What self-hosting asks of you
- One OpenMediaVault 8 setup
- What Immich’s Borg example backs up
What the library offers
XDA Developers writer João Carrasqueira describes a timeline organized by date, a memories section, albums shared with his wife, and a map that uses location data in photo metadata. He also reports tools for reviewing duplicate or similar images, finding large files, adding locations to multiple images, and creating workflows that tag photos or add them to albums.
Carrasqueira says face recognition and smart search run on his server. He also notes that face matches can be imperfect, and that initial setup can be a hassle. His account is one household’s experience, not a guarantee of the same results for every library.
What self-hosting asks of you
With Immich, the household running the server takes on its upkeep and the responsibility for keeping the photo library recoverable. One Immich community member describes this as becoming the household’s system administrator for photos and video, including responsibility for redundancy and backups.
Carrasqueira reports paying about $1.50 per month, including tax, for a Backblaze B2 copy of just under 200 GB. That is the cost of one person’s off-site backup, not a general price for Immich or a full estimate of running a home server. Backblaze B2 is a separate storage destination, not the photo-library interface.
One OpenMediaVault 8 setup
A Spanish-language walkthrough demonstrates one way to deploy Immich through OpenMediaVault 8’s Compose interface. Its stack includes the Immich server, a machine-learning service, Redis, and PostgreSQL. The presenter sets storage paths and database variables, starts the services, and opens that installation’s web interface on port 2283. Those details describe the walkthrough’s configuration.
What Immich’s Borg example backs up
Immich’s Borg backup template places a database dump in the upload directory, then backs up that directory in versioned snapshots. That keeps the database and the library assets together in each snapshot. The example excludes the thumbs/ and encoded-video/ directories, and assumes both a second drive for a local copy and a remote repository for an off-site copy.
The template initializes Borg repositories with borg init --encryption=none. As written, that command does not encrypt the Borg repository. The setting applies to this template’s initialization command.
