Immich

Immich is the self-hosted photo and video management platform that actually competes with the big players. Upload from your phone, browse on the web, search by faces, places, or objects using on-device ML.

AGPL v3, TypeScript backend with a Flutter mobile app. Automatic backup from iOS/Android, facial recognition, reverse geocoding, timeline view, shared albums, and a map view. Machine learning runs locally on your server for object detection and face clustering.

Self-hosting is free. Docker Compose is the recommended path; you need decent storage and ideally a GPU for faster ML, but CPU works too. Immich offers a paid license for businesses, but the software is fully functional without paying. Solo: perfect. Replace Google Photos for your personal library. Families: shared albums work great. Growing orgs: this isn't designed for enterprise photo management. Large: look at purpose-built DAM (digital asset management) solutions.

The catch: Immich is pre-1.0 and the developers explicitly warn against using it as your only backup. The API and schema can change between updates. Keep your originals backed up elsewhere. ML features need real compute: 4GB RAM minimum, more for large libraries.