Immich

Immich is the self-hosted Google Photos that actually delivers on the promise. Background upload from your phone, facial recognition, smart search ("photos of dogs at the beach"), shared albums — all running on your hardware with your data. It reached stable in late 2025 and the experience is polished enough for families.

Google Photos is the commercial benchmark — better ML, more storage options, but your photos feed Google's AI. Photoprism is the older self-hosted alternative with less momentum. Nextcloud has a photos module but it's an afterthought.

If you want to own your photo library and have a server (NAS, old PC, VPS), Immich is a no-brainer. The mobile app is genuinely good, not "good for open source" — actually good. ML-powered search works locally.

The catch: AGPL license means no building commercial services on top. You need decent hardware for the ML features — transcoding and face recognition will crush a Raspberry Pi. And backup is your responsibility — if your server dies and you didn't back up, those photos are gone.