Gets better every update. I’m hosting with UnRAID and using iPhones. My wife and I can back up and share photos easily and automatically without paying a subscription fee or storing our data on other people’s servers.Update: I’ve been using this since September 2023, and it’s better than ever now! I have limited storage on my iPhone, so about once a week I select the current month and hit upload to make sure it’s been uploaded, then select and hit remove from device. I’ve never felt so free to actually record videos of my kids without being worried storage space!

The primary purpose of a backup is to restore data from it. However, in practice, Immich is horrible at restoring photos to your phone. Consider this scenario: you purchase a new iPhone and use your own Immich server to back up your old iPhone’s photos. You want some of those photos on your new iPhone, so you open the Immich app, connect it to your new phone, and press the download button on a few photos to create a wallpaper on your new iPhone. Surprisingly, the app is coded so poorly that it doesn’t exclude the photos you restored or downloaded from Immich to your new phone. As a result, you end up with duplicates on the Immich server when the auto-backup begins from your new iPhone. It only excludes those photos once it backs them up again.I conducted some research and discovered that someone had submitted a feature request on the Immich GitHub to “Prevent re-upload of downloaded photos during app backup task.” The maintainer, bo0tzz, responded to them by suggesting that you should exclude the download album from your backup selection. However, this solution is invalid. Once you exclude the download album, you won’t be able to backup any photos saved from Safari or any other app. The app is stupidly designed to only exclude photos it backs up rather than also excluding the restored photos you download from it.

The new update allows background photo uploading, which is amazing. And on the roadmap (as of today, Feb 22, 2023) is integrating the CLIP model machine learning to do image search, which will be better than any other major current iOS photo app. Also on the roadmap is face recognition/search. Updates come extremely frequently, and every one makes this app better and better. This is quickly becoming a true google apps replacement.To top it off, it’s all open source and runs on your own server for the backend.Keep up the fantastic work!

The Immich App is an outstanding project that truly prioritizes privacy and security. In a time when personal photos are often vulnerable, this app provides a safe and reliable space to store precious memories with peace of mind. The developers have done an incredible job creating a platform that is both user-friendly and secure, ensuring that privacy is never compromised. Huge thanks to everyone involved in making this possible—we need more projects like this that genuinely care about protecting people’s digital lives!