Immich vs PhotoPrism vs LibrePhotos 2026

Why Self-Host Your Photos?

Google Photos changed its free unlimited storage policy in 2021 — all uploads now count toward your Google account's 15GB limit. After that, you pay $3/month for 100GB, $9.99/month for 2TB. iCloud costs similar. Amazon Photos is free for Prime members but Prime is $14.99/month.

Your photo library is personal, permanent, and often irreplaceable. Keeping it in a vendor's cloud means trusting them with your memories, paying indefinitely for storage, and depending on service continuity.

Self-hosted photo management gives you unlimited storage (limited only by your hardware), automatic mobile backup, AI-powered search and face recognition, and complete data ownership.

TL;DR

• Immich (90K+ GitHub stars): The clear winner in 2026. Google Photos-like experience, native mobile apps with automatic backup, excellent AI features. Fastest-growing self-hosted photo tool ever.
• PhotoPrism (39K+ stars): Good for AI-powered organization and searching. Fewer mobile backup features than Immich, no native apps.
• LibrePhotos (8K+ stars): Best face detection quality. More niche but actively developed. Better at finding faces than PhotoPrism.

Quick Comparison

Feature	Immich	PhotoPrism	LibrePhotos
GitHub Stars	90K+	39K+	8K+
Mobile app (iOS/Android)	Native app	PWA only	PWA only
Auto backup from phone	Yes	Manual/WebDAV	Limited
Face recognition	Good	Limited	Excellent
AI search	Yes	Yes	Yes
Video support	Yes	Yes	Yes
Albums	Yes	Yes	Yes
Sharing	Yes	Yes	Limited
Map view	Yes	Yes	Yes
RAW support	Yes	Yes	Yes
Self-hosting complexity	Medium	Medium	Medium
License	AGPL-3.0	AGPL-3.0	AGPL-3.0

Immich — The Clear 2026 Winner

Immich hit 90,000+ GitHub stars in early 2026, making it one of the fastest-growing self-hosted projects in history. The reason is simple: it genuinely replicates the Google Photos experience better than any alternative, with features like automatic phone backup, AI photo search, shared albums, and timeline view.

What Makes It Stand Out

Native mobile apps: Immich has official iOS and Android apps that automatically back up photos and videos from your phone. Open the app, connect to your Immich server, and your photos start syncing immediately. This is the killer feature — no more manual transfers.

AI-powered search: Search your photos by content: "beach," "birthday cake," "cats," "sunset," "red car." The AI analyzes image content and builds a searchable index. Find photos you couldn't remember the name or date of.

Face recognition: Automatically detect and group faces across your library. Name the faces you see, and Immich will surface all photos of that person.

Timeline and memories: Scroll through photos organized by date and location. "Memories" resurface photos from 1, 3, or 5 years ago — the same feature that makes Google Photos feel personal.

Video support: Upload and playback videos alongside photos. Transcoding for web streaming included.

Shared albums: Create albums and share them with other Immich users or via link. Perfect for family photo sharing.

External library support: Point Immich at an existing directory of photos (e.g., your existing photo backup) and it will index them without moving files.

Self-Hosting

services:
  immich-server:
    image: ghcr.io/immich-app/immich-server:release
    volumes:
      - /photos:/usr/src/app/upload
    ports:
      - "2283:3001"
  immich-microservices:
    image: ghcr.io/immich-app/immich-server:release
    command: microservices
    volumes:
      - /photos:/usr/src/app/upload
  immich-machine-learning:
    image: ghcr.io/immich-app/immich-machine-learning:release
    volumes:
      - immich-model-cache:/cache
  redis:
    image: redis:6.2-alpine
  database:
    image: tensorchord/pgvecto-rs:pg16-v0.2.0
    environment:
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: postgres
      POSTGRES_USER: postgres
      POSTGRES_DB: immich

Immich requires 4-5 Docker containers. The machine learning container handles AI features — you can omit it to save resources, but you lose AI-powered search and face recognition.

Resource requirements: 2GB RAM minimum for basic use, 4GB+ recommended for AI features. GPU acceleration for the machine learning container dramatically speeds up indexing.

Limitations

• More complex deployment than simpler gallery tools
• Initial ML indexing is slow (days for large libraries)
• Heavier resource usage than PhotoPrism for basic photo viewing

Best for: Anyone replacing Google Photos or iCloud. The best self-hosted photo management solution in 2026 for most use cases.

PhotoPrism — Best for Advanced Organization

PhotoPrism (39K+ stars) takes a more technical approach to photo management. It's excellent for photographers with large, carefully organized libraries who want AI assistance with tagging and search.

What Makes It Stand Out

AI classification: PhotoPrism uses multiple AI models to classify photos by content, scene, color, quality, and other attributes. Photos get automatically tagged.

RAW processing: Strong support for camera RAW files (CR2, ARW, NEF, etc.) with JPEG previews generated.

Private mode: Photos can be marked private and excluded from public sharing and search.

Sync modes: Flexible sync options — import/copy files, watch folders, WebDAV server for mobile apps.

Advanced search: Powerful search syntax including labels, colors, years, locations, and quality scores.

Self-Hosting

docker run -d \
  --name photoprism \
  -p 2342:2342 \
  -v /photos/originals:/photoprism/originals \
  -v /photos/storage:/photoprism/storage \
  -e PHOTOPRISM_AUTH_MODE="password" \
  -e PHOTOPRISM_ADMIN_PASSWORD="password" \
  photoprism/photoprism:latest

PhotoPrism can run as a single container (with SQLite) or with MariaDB for better performance at scale.

Limitations

• No native mobile apps — mobile backup requires third-party apps like PhotoSync or Syncthing
• Face detection is less accurate than Immich or LibrePhotos
• Less active development pace than Immich

Best for: Photographers with established workflows who want AI-powered search and tagging without migrating to Immich's architecture.

LibrePhotos — Best Face Detection

LibrePhotos (8K+ stars) is the smaller, more niche option — but it has one distinctive strength: face detection quality significantly better than PhotoPrism.

What Makes It Stand Out

Face detection: LibrePhotos uses MTCNN for face detection, finding roughly 10x more faces than PhotoPrism in comparable tests. If face recognition and organization is important to your photo library, LibrePhotos excels here.

Photo Stacks: LibrePhotos recently added support for RAW+JPEG pairs and Live Photos as stacked photo entities — similar to how Photos.app handles these on Apple devices.

Python/Django backend: If you want to understand or modify the code, LibrePhotos is simpler to work with than Immich's TypeScript/Java stack.

Active development: Despite smaller star count, LibrePhotos continues regular updates and blog posts documenting progress.

Self-Hosting

git clone https://github.com/LibrePhotos/librephotos-docker
cd librephotos-docker
cp .env.sample .env
docker compose up -d

LibrePhotos runs as multiple containers (frontend, backend, ML services, PostgreSQL, Redis).

Limitations

• Less polished interface than Immich
• No native mobile apps
• Smaller community and fewer integrations
• Less actively developed than Immich

Best for: Users who prioritize face detection quality and prefer a Python/Django codebase.

Storage Cost Comparison

Commercial Photo Storage (Annual)

Service	Storage	Annual Cost
Google One	100GB	$36
Google One	2TB	$120
iCloud	200GB	$36
iCloud	2TB	$120
Amazon Photos	Unlimited photos (Prime req.)	$180 (Prime)

Self-Hosted (2TB Storage)

Setup	Storage	Monthly	Annual
Hetzner Storage Box 2TB	2TB external	$4.36	$52
Hetzner CPX21 + 2TB local SSD	2TB	$40	$480
Hetzner CPX21 + Hetzner Volume 2TB	2TB	$6.50 + $20	$318

For 2TB, self-hosting saves $0-$162/year over commercial options depending on setup. At 5TB+ (where commercial costs jump significantly), self-hosting saves substantially more.

The real value is unlimited photos from all family members without per-account fees, and permanent data ownership.

Migration from Google Photos

1. Use Google Takeout to export all photos
2. Extract the .zip files from Takeout
3. Import into Immich via CLI: immich upload --recursive /path/to/takeout/Google\ Photos/
4. Immich preserves original dates from EXIF and Takeout JSON metadata
5. Install Immich mobile app and configure auto backup

For large Google Photos libraries (100GB+), the export + import process takes several hours to days depending on connection speed.

Setting Up Reliable Backup: Making Self-Hosting Work Long-Term

Deploying Immich on a home server or VPS is the beginning. The harder question is making the photo library genuinely safe over years — not just accessible, but durably protected against hardware failure, accidental deletion, and software bugs.

The 3-2-1 backup rule applied to photos. Photographic memories are irreplaceable in a way that code or documents are not. The 3-2-1 rule — three copies, on two different media types, with one copy offsite — applies with particular force here. Your Immich server counts as one copy. A local backup drive (attached to the same server or a NAS on the same network) is the second copy on different media. Rclone or Restic syncing to an offsite cloud provider (Backblaze B2, Cloudflare R2, or Amazon S3) is the third copy offsite. For Immich specifically, back up the PostgreSQL database and the upload volume separately — losing the database means losing all album metadata, face tagging, and search indexes even if the original files survive.

Storage planning for large photo libraries. A 10-year photo library from two smartphones generates 200–500 GB of photos and videos. Adding RAW files from a DSLR can push this to 1–2 TB or more. Plan your storage architecture before upload:

• Local SSD for the Immich database (fast random read/write, smaller — 20–50 GB sufficient)
• Local HDD or NAS volume for the photo library (larger, slower, mechanical is fine for bulk storage)
• Tiered object storage for long-term archive (older photos accessed rarely can move to cheaper cold storage)

Hetzner's storage boxes (€3.81/month for 1 TB) or Backblaze B2 ($6/TB/month) are the most cost-effective offsite storage options for self-hosted photo libraries.

Mobile backup reliability. Immich's mobile app automatic backup is the feature that makes it actually work for replacing Google Photos. But the backup process needs to succeed reliably on mobile networks and battery-constrained devices. Configure the Immich iOS/Android app to backup on WiFi only (to avoid cellular data charges) and while charging (to preserve battery). Enable background refresh so uploads complete without keeping the app open. Verify weekly that the upload count in the Immich mobile app matches your expected photo count — silent backup failures are the most dangerous failure mode, because you don't discover them until you need the photos.

The cold start problem: importing existing photos. If you're migrating from Google Photos, the initial import is the most time-consuming step. Google Takeout exports your library as a ZIP archive — extract it, then use Immich's immich-cli to upload recursively. The CLI preserves EXIF date metadata and reads creation dates from Takeout's accompanying JSON metadata files. For a 10-year library of 50,000 photos, the initial upload typically takes 12–48 hours depending on network speed and server resources. Machine learning indexing (face detection, AI search) runs asynchronously after upload and may take several additional days to complete on large libraries.

Long-term self-hosting commitment. Unlike Google Photos, a self-hosted Immich instance requires ongoing maintenance: updating Immich releases (several times per month), updating the underlying OS, responding to backup failures, and occasionally migrating to new hardware. The operational commitment is roughly 1–2 hours per month for a small household library. The tradeoff — permanent data ownership and zero ongoing subscription cost — is compelling for anyone who has felt the anxiety of depending on Google's product decisions for their personal memories.

For teams building a full homelab stack alongside photo management, the homelab software stack guide 2026 covers the broader set of services that pair well with Immich. For backup automation specifically, automated server backups with Restic and Rclone 2026 covers the tools for the offsite backup piece of the 3-2-1 strategy. Teams deploying Immich alongside other self-hosted services should review the self-hosting security checklist 2026 before exposing Immich to the public internet.

Find Your Photo Manager

Browse all Google Photos alternatives on OSSAlt — compare Immich, PhotoPrism, LibrePhotos, Piwigo, and every other open source photo management platform with deployment guides and feature comparisons.