I switched to Immich, but Google Photos still wins on these 5 fronts

When it comes to self-hosted alternatives to Google Photos, it doesn't get much better than Immich. The app is designed to provide a seamless experience for people switching from Google Photos—and it definitely shows.

However, as much as self-hosters like me value full ownership and privacy over our photos, as well as not being tied to subscription fees, there's no denying that Google Photos still has some massive inherent advantages.

Google Photos wins when it comes to backup reliability

Cloud-first reliability is hard to beat

Cloud-based storage services have proven to be some of the most reliable and secure ways to store data, and Google sits very high on the list of such services.

Google stores your photos using highly redundant storage systems, with data distributed across its massive data centers in different geographical locations. Even if a natural catastrophe were to hit one of those data centers or a massive technical failure occurred, you likely wouldn't even be aware that it happened because your photos would remain available.

But if you run Immich on your home server, then your photos are only as safe as the hardware and backup strategy you have in place. Sure, there are ways to make it more reliable, such as running your hard drives in a redundant RAID configuration , but if we're being realistic, it's impossible to replicate the level of geographic redundancy that Google provides from a typical home server.

Another related problem I've noticed with Immich is that the Android app sometimes gets a little lazy, at least on my phone.

Ideally, it should back up all photos without me ever having to think about it, but in practice, I've noticed it sometimes doesn't upload photos for hours or even days if I haven't opened the app in a while. This could very likely be due to how aggressively my OnePlus handles background tasks, but still, it's not an issue I've experienced with Google Photos—after all, it is a Google app.

You become responsible for keeping everything online

Self-hosting means owning the downtime

Massive companies like Google have a strong track record of keeping their services operational. Case in point, I can't think of a time I've opened Google Photos and it wouldn't load because the servers were down. And should something go wrong, it's Google's responsibility to investigate and fix it as quickly as possible.

In contrast, Immich and the server it runs on are your responsibility , and yours alone.

Even if you keep your server running 24/7, a failed update, broken Docker container, dying hard drive, power outage, or router issue could all take your photos offline. And when that happens, you're the one who has to figure out what went wrong and fix it.

Google's AI still recognizes photos more accurately, and it's much faster

Years of machine learning are hard to replicate

Immich has an impressive suite of machine learning features . After spending some time setting up Immich and running the ML jobs, I was genuinely impressed by how well it recognized faces and objects.

However, and I'm saying this while acknowledging that Immich offers several different AI models to choose from, its ML feature set still isn't on the same level as Google's. Google is one of the leading companies in AI and has spent billions on developing and refining its models using exabytes of data and computing resources.

Whether it's image search, face recognition, object detection, or identifying similar photos, Google Photos still has a significant advantage in machine learning. The built-in editor is also far, far more powerful and has AI features, whereas Immich's image editor is restricted to the basics.

Google Photos doesn't require you to buy any hardware

Both options have ongoing costs, but they come in different forms

Google provides every account with 15GB of storage that's shared across a few services, including Google Photos. It's not much, but the built-in storage-saving compression option can still let you store thousands of photos before you run out of space.

Still, if you take your photo backups seriously, you probably won't mind paying a few dollars every month to unlock more storage and some extra features.

Immich, in contrast, doesn't have any recurring costs aside from the electricity needed to run your home server. The real cost comes from building your server and buying storage if you're starting from scratch.

Admittedly, you don't need much to get started —a few hundred dollars can get you several terabytes of storage, which gives you more space per dollar than cloud storage. However, that comes with an upfront cost, and if something breaks, you'll have to pay to replace it.

Getting Immich running takes far more work than creating a Google account

Self-hosting isn't for everyone

Buying and setting up the hardware required to host Immich is only one part of the story. The actual time-consuming part is getting everything configured correctly. While online guides make this easier than ever, there's still a degree of personalization and troubleshooting that you have to account for.

If it's your first time managing a Linux server, like it was for me , you'll have to learn what Docker is, how to set up a Docker Compose file, map out storage locations, configure permissions, and more.

And I haven't even mentioned setting up remote access yet. While Google Photos is accessible from anywhere in the world, the only way you can access Immich outside your home is if you manually set up remote access , such as through a VPN, reverse proxy, or some other method.

There's also the ongoing responsibility of keeping your Immich server updated and troubleshooting issues when they come up. Immich 3.0 launched a few weeks ago, and I spent around half an hour of my free time reconfiguring and troubleshooting the app just to get everything working again.

This is the kind of friction that puts casual users off, whereas Google Photos removes it entirely.

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Immich is still the best Google Photos alternative if you value privacy and control

Despite all the theoretical disadvantages of Immich compared to Google Photos, I've still made the switch , and I haven't looked back.

Aside from potentially saving a few bucks on recurring subscriptions over the years, the real benefit comes from having complete privacy and control over my photos. That being said, I fully understand that the headaches that come with self-hosting aren't for everyone, and if you value convenience, Google Photos is still hard to beat.