For years, Google Photos was the easiest part of my online life. Every picture I took automatically landed in the cloud, faces got tagged without me lifting a finger, and a quick search for “beach” or “dog” brought up exactly what I wanted. But the convenience came with a steep hidden cost: my entire photo library, including thousands of private family images, was sitting on someone else’s servers. That made the trade-off clear to me: I was handing over a massive personal history to a tech giant that has every incentive to analyze it, monetize it, or change the terms of the deal whenever it wants.
That trade-off finally stopped feeling worth it, so I left Google Photos behind. I’ve since tried a few different homes for my library, including Sync.com’s encrypted cloud storage. This time, I wanted to go a step further: no third party at all, encrypted or not. So I moved my library to Immich.
What is Immich, and how does it replace Google Photos?
Core features that replace Google Photos’ best tools
Immich is a self-hosted photo and video management platform built to feel like a drop-in replacement for Google Photos or Apple’s iCloud Photos. You run it on your own machine (a server, a NAS, a spare PC, or, in my case, a laptop) and install a companion app on your phone. The app automatically backs up new photos and videos to your server over Wi-Fi, just like the Google Photos app backs them up to the cloud.
Once your images land on the server, Immich handles the heavy lifting you’re used to:
- Facial recognition, which clusters photos by the people in them, so you can browse by face rather than by date
- Object and scene detection, so you can search for “sunset” or “car” and get relevant results, powered by a local machine learning model instead of a cloud API
- Automatic timeline organization, memories/on-this-day resurfacing, and album creation
- Multi-user support, so other people in your household can back up to the same server with their own separate libraries
The key difference is where the processing happens. Google Photos runs its recognition models on Google’s infrastructure and stores the results and copies of your photos on Google’s servers indefinitely, subject to Google’s terms of service. Immich runs the same category of models locally on hardware you control, and nothing leaves your network unless you explicitly configure it to do so.
- OS
-
Linux, Windows, macOS, Android, iOS
- Price model
-
Free
Immich is a self-hosted solution that allows you back up, organize, and manage your photos on your own server. It allows you to browse your photos and videos with ease and does not sacrifice privacy.
How to install Immich on a MacBook Pro
Step-by-step setup using Docker
Immich runs through Docker, which means the install process is essentially identical across operating systems: you’re not compiling anything or battling with dependencies; you’re just running containers. On a MacBook Pro, the steps look like this:
- Install a container runtime. Docker Desktop is the official option, though many Mac users prefer OrbStack, a lighter-weight alternative that uses noticeably less RAM and battery in the background, a meaningful consideration if the Mac in question isn’t a dedicated server.
- Download Immich’s configuration files. The project provides a docker-compose.yml and .env file from its official GitHub repository. These define the database, backend, machine learning service, and web UI as separate containers that work together.
- Set your storage location. You’ll edit the .env file to point to wherever you want your photo library actually stored, whether that’s the Mac’s internal drive or an external drive if you want to keep the library separate from your system disk.
- Run it. A single docker compose up -d command pulls the images and starts everything. Within a few minutes, the Immich web interface is reachable at localhost:2283 on the Mac itself, or at the Mac’s local IP address from any other device on the network.
- Install the mobile app and point it at your server’s address instead of Google’s or Apple’s. From there, it behaves like any other photo backup app: background uploads, Wi-Fi-only sync options, and so on.
Apple Silicon Macs (M1 through M4) run ARM64-native container images without problems, and performance for both the web interface and machine-learning tagging is excellent on modern Apple chips.
For installation, I used Claude Computer, which made the process so much easier.
Immich on Mac vs. PC: key differences to know
GPU acceleration, sleep settings, and file system behavior
Because Immich runs entirely inside Docker, the underlying steps are nearly identical whether you’re installing it on macOS, Windows, or Linux. The differences that matter are mostly about the environment around Docker, not Immich itself, especially when comparing a MacBook Pro with a PC:
- GPU-based acceleration for machine learning. On a PC, especially one with an Nvidia GPU, Immich’s face and object detection can use CUDA acceleration, which speeds up processing considerably, particularly when you’re first importing a large existing library. On a Mac, standard Docker can’t pass through the GPU the way a Linux box utilizes Nvidia CUDA. Instead, Immich relies on Apple Silicon’s highly efficient CPU architecture and unified memory. Thanks to modern M-series architecture, it still breezes through local machine learning tasks, though a massive initial import of an old library will take longer than it would on a dedicated desktop graphics card.
- Sleep and power behavior. This is the bigger practical difference. A PC or NAS is generally built to run 24/7 as a matter of course. A MacBook, by contrast, is designed to sleep aggressively to save battery, and, by default, it won’t respond to backup requests from your phone once the lid is closed, or it’s been idle. You need to explicitly disable sleep (in Energy Saver / Battery preferences) and keep it plugged in and connected to the same network, so backups arrive reliably.
- File system quirks. On macOS, Docker runs in a lightweight Linux virtual machine, which introduces a small amount of file I/O overhead compared to running natively on Linux. In practice, for a personal photo library, this difference is not noticeable.
Functionally, once it’s running, there’s no difference in what Immich can do on a Mac versus a PC. The choice mostly comes down to what hardware you already have sitting around and whether you’re comfortable leaving it powered on continuously.
The advantages and disadvantages of self-hosting your photos with Immich
Privacy, cost, and ownership benefits vs. continued maintenance
There are several important and useful reasons to use Immich vs. Google Photos:
- Privacy is the headline reason. Your photos, including the facial recognition data, stay on hardware that you physically control. No third-party scanning, no ad targeting, and no waking up to a surprise terms-of-service update. That is the point of the switch.
- No storage subscription. Google Photos backup at full quality now counts against your Google One storage quota, which pushes many people into a recurring monthly subscription as their library grows. With Immich, your storage limit is whatever drive you attach, expandable cheaply and paid for once instead of forever.
- No account risk. Google account suspensions, however rare, can lock people out of years of photos with limited recourse. A self-hosted library removes that single point of failure entirely: you can’t be locked out of your own hard drive.
- Open standards and portability. Immich stores photos as regular files in a folder structure you can browse directly, rather than in a proprietary database you can only access through the app. If you ever want to migrate away from Immich itself, your actual photos are just sitting there in the clear.
Of course, some disadvantages also exist:
- It’s not zero-maintenance. Google Photos requires nothing from you: no updates, no backups, no troubleshooting. Immich requires you to keep Docker and the containers updated, and critically, to maintain your own backup of the server itself. If a drive fails, and you haven’t backed up your Immich data separately, you could lose your entire library. When you self-host, you become your own IT department: keeping your data safe is entirely on you.
- Uptime depends on your hardware. If the machine running Immich is off, asleep, or disconnected from the network, your phone simply won’t back up new photos until it’s reachable again. Google’s servers, on the other hand, never go to sleep.
- No off-site backup by default. Google Photos is inherently off-site: your house could burn down, and the photos would survive. A self-hosted setup on a single machine in your home doesn’t have that protection unless you deliberately set up a second backup location, such as cloud storage for encrypted archives or a drive kept at another site.
- Set up and troubleshooting require actual technical comfort. Docker, environment files, and networking aren’t difficult once you’ve done them, but they’re a meaningfully higher barrier than downloading an app and tapping “sign in.”
Was it worth it? My final verdict on Immich
For me, yes. The face recognition and search are close enough to Google Photos that I don’t miss the feature set, and knowing my library isn’t sitting in someone else’s data center is worth the extra setup. But let’s be clear: this is a compromise, not a magic fix. The point is to trade effortless cloud redundancy for absolute privacy and data ownership.
If you don’t already have a spare machine, you’re comfortable leaving it on, or you’re not willing to think about your own backup strategy, Google Photos will still serve you better. If you do, Immich turns a machine you already own into a powerful private cloud that replicates Google’s best features on your own terms.
