Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage

sspeckx about 4 hours ago 94 commentsRead Article on markpitblado.me

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Discussion (94 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

drdexebtjl•about 3 hours ago

I use Immich, but saved me money it has not.

Unless you actually go through the "Backing up your photos" step, you _will_ lose your photos, it's just a matter of time. And if you're like most people, that is probably not acceptable.

And by the time you do the math for the cost of your backups, you'll find Google Photos pricing is actually pretty good.

Still worth it, imo.

pkulak•about 2 hours ago

Absolutely. I pay Borgbase $10 a month (about). I could probably get a huge storage limit in Google for that money.

But it's worth it to me to be answerable to no one. I can't, say, sign in to my Google account with an unlocked phone and get banned. Boom, photos gone, no matter how many backups Google made on my behalf. And if I'm gonna do a "takeout" every month and back that up; might as well host myself. Immich is also absolutely amazing software.

bilalq•about 2 hours ago

Yeah. I actually love Google Photos as a product. I just want Immich as a safety net in case Google ever feels like locking me out of my account on a random Tuesday.

I haven't really found a guide or discussions on how best to use Immich in this mirroring way. Admittedly, I haven't looked very hard. Setting up Immich is something that's been on my todo list for years now.

kqr•about 2 hours ago

I jumped on the lifetime offer I received from rsync.net at some point (one of the few providers I would trust with such an offer!), so I no longer pay for backup as long as I stay below some ridiculously high number...

odo1242•about 2 hours ago

In my case: I did the math and it would take me ~4-5 years to recoup the initial investment (of about $450) in my homelab (comparing my server + 3 copies of 2TB with the cost of a 2TB google drive subscription). (Also excludes the time spent building the server, and I found very good deals; if you get a regular NAS this becomes about ~10 years)

There is, however, a fixed component cost to building such a setup that gets amortized the more disks you buy- I believe it becomes worth it to use a NAS cost-wise over about ~5-6TB of data (and definitively worth it when you get into the tens of terabytes).

Or if you need low-latency storage / any type of performance - neither the cloud nor my homelab has removed my need for my portable NVMe drive

odo1242•about 2 hours ago

(The other benefit of having a homelab is, of course, you can run services that aren’t limited to cloud offerings and run processing on the data locally)

megagpt5•about 2 hours ago

What's the math for the cost of getting banned from Google for some stupid AI reason?

altmanaltman•about 3 hours ago

People setting up homelab often talk about money saved but never account for the time they have to spend as well not just in setting it up and maintainence. If you value your time, the cost of a google pro subscription is not much. I still run a homelab because I like it and yes its good to be able to run several services for "free" but the commitment is never free.

This is also true for businesses. I used to think why do companies don't use open source and save so much on infrastructure costs etc but in reality those costs don't really matter to them and self-hosting costs in terms of time and resources do add up + no gurantee as provided by enterprise level services etc.

swed420•about 2 hours ago

What you call a commitment, many call a hobby / learning / refreshening opportunity.

altmanaltman•about 2 hours ago

yes but there is still an opportunity cost. As I said I still do it because I like it but I also have a life outside just computers. Any time i spend on my homelab is also time I take away from other things. Also there is learning but a lot of the time is spent on doing menial system admin tasks or helping solve "user problems" (i.e. figure out why my partner's friend cannot access jellyfin anymore). So it does become a chore over time and there is always a cost. You can justify it by saying you are getting value out of it but in my experience, this is true for every activity. Everyone has limited time and spending it importantly is important to me.

ishtanbul•about 2 hours ago

I’d be shocked if anyone running a homelab was really saving much if any money. From personal experience, it has snowballed into a never ending science project of upgrading and tinkering which i enjoy but it probably costing me multiples of cloud subscriptions. I just find it fun and like to learn, and love to diy.

spl757•about 2 hours ago

I run all my own stuff local-first, but I am also a systems and networking engineer and understand all of the concepts so I can build it properly. It takes time, and the willingness to do so. If you don't already have the knowledge to set things like this up, and are really doing it to save money as a consumer, then Google Photos as a product is more of a fit and the user will definitely have a better experience.

For someone like me, it's easy and quick and I have a very robust incremental backup system with air-gapped copies. So it does save me money, because it only takes my time and knowledge.

There is no absolute answer, because it's subjective depending on the needs of the user.

tripleee•about 2 hours ago

This is exactly the reason why companies aren't just going to vibe-code their own software. It's more expensive to maintain than it is just to pay for it outright

semi-extrinsic•about 1 hour ago

Depends heavily on the software cost and how far from core competency it is.

If the company already has a developer team and the software is an expensive domain-specific CRUD app for internal use without significant compliance or risk factors - sure, go DIY.

If the company does not employ any devs, or if the core logic of the software is a business secret of the vendor, or it is customer facing, or there are significant compliance / risk factors - you are better off paying for it.

Unless the cost is astronomical, or the company is motivated also by anger at rent-seeking MBA f*ckers at the vendor.

bs7280•about 2 hours ago

The way I see it, I am committing more time and hassle to setup my homelab now to save time, money, and hassle later when the SaaS alternate's inevitably do something hostile to me as the user.

Even before AI coding I did not trust big tech companies to make updates that have my best interests in mind. Many of these examples are weird feature or ux changes - like how spotify treats liked songs as a playlist (requiring more taps to like a song). Not the end of the world. But on the more extreme side, my gaming PC's windows installation has died via bad windows update twice now. I don't use it for anything important anymore. It's insane that my claude code driven homelab stack has allowed me to have better uptime than github.

Now in the AI coding era, its obvious to me that alot of the tools I am forced to use on a day to day basis are frequently shipped with slop, causing more bugs and all around jankier UX's. With my claude max subscription, im suddenly able to make tools perfectly tailored to what I want, and I can rest assured I wont wake up and find the equivalent of a bad IOS update.

altmanaltman•about 2 hours ago

yes makes sense but don't you think that risk will also extend to OSS? I get there's more freedom and people can always fork but I have experienced several open source projects go to garbage as well and forced me to switch to another service.

And yes Google had gotten progressively every year that I have been a paying customer as well so I am not against your point either. All I am saying is sometimes cloud makes sense financially as well even though open source allows you to do it for free technically. Enshiftication is the word of our age for everything imo unfortunately

Banditoz•about 2 hours ago

Eh, once it's set up the maintenance cost is minimal. Cron'd backups and such and you won't have to worry.

altmanaltman•about 2 hours ago

Yes I would consider my system optimal in terms of backup process etc. But I still tinker with it, try out new things, maintain the machines itself, it is a hobby. And it does consume time for me at least. But either way, I am sure a google pro subscription is still cheaper for me than the time value of setting up and maintainence, in the sense we are talking about saving money in real terms

tehlike•about 3 hours ago

Google takeout is pretty good with exporting photos.

TheJCDenton•about 2 hours ago

Be aware that for a few 100's Go the google takeout files will contains corrupted data.

You have to make at least 2 takeout to be sure to have all your files in good shape.

The problem is notto download but to verify and be sure nothing else is missing.

adolph•about 3 hours ago

Last I checked Takeout is a single zip file. Once you have a photo repository of a certain size, that approach becomes difficult, no?

tehlike•about 2 hours ago

I exported something like 450GB photos in chunks of 50GB iirc.

Tip: export the takeout to Google drive then download it from there.

Otherwise link downloads have # of times you can retry before they are deleted.

madduci•about 2 hours ago

They do also split up to 2GB archives. So they are very manageable

orev•about 1 hour ago

“You _will_ lose them”, as in, somehow Immich will do something to lose them (like making a mistake in a dedupe process which deletes the wrong things), or are you just saying you also need to keep backups?

Computer0•about 1 hour ago

More so that any storage system will eventually fail me thinks.

Noaidi•about 3 hours ago

I was in a paranoid psychotic state a few months back and I delete my whole photo library. About 40GB or my life for the last 15 years.

Looking back now it is no big deal. My burden has lessened and i am still the same man I was.

esafak•about 3 hours ago

Of all my possessions, I would discard my photos last.

tehlike•about 3 hours ago

Same here. My family photos are a treasure to me.

dominotw•about 3 hours ago

is nas + backup to amazon glacier a good solution?

semi-extrinsic•about 1 hour ago

For cold / glacial backups, M-disc will run you $200 for 10x 100GB discs, plus around $300 for a pair of USB Blu-ray burners. With that, your data up to 500 GB can be written in duplicates and stored at two physical locations (one drive at each location), with very strong guarantees that it will be readable far into the future.

If you write 2 additional disks per year, this is a $500 initial investment plus $20 per year. Compared to Google's "AI Plus" plan you break even in year 5, assuming Google keeps pricing flat.

Of course you don't get any cloud access or similar.

pkulak•about 2 hours ago

Yes, but it's hard. I've not found something that works well with glacier, because most backup solutions want to write state, modify files immediately, etc, and glacier can't do that. It would need to be an append-only backup; strictly.

I do a bit of a hybrid. Borg to expensive, always available storage, but really large stuff that rarely changes and is less important, I exclude and manually throw in glacier once a year or so. Think, all your blue-ray rips, etc.

drdexebtjl•about 1 hour ago

I wouldn’t back up directly to Glacier, because you want to be able to verify your backups, and reading from Glacier is expensive.

tripleee•about 2 hours ago

Yes. Should have 1 onsite + 1 offsite backup ideally.

ValtteriL•about 3 hours ago

I made the jump to Immich a month ago after having to prune my Drive more and more often as my free Drive quota ran totally out after 8 years of freeloading.

My homelab had spare capacity and I had already offsite backups to Hetzner Storage Box sorted out so it didn't take long or increase my costs.

Very good experience so far. I moved all my photos including multiple complete wedding albums to it, something I couldn't do with Drive without "converting". Nice to finally have all the Google Photos goodies for everything.

Shout out to immich-go, a cli tool for bulk uploads from Google takeout archives.

Helmut10001•about 3 hours ago

I love immich! On board since June 2026. But, here's a brief report on my evening installation project.. setting up Immich: Ingesting a 1.7TB library (160k+ RAW photos) is apparently not a standard task!

- Thumbnails and ML vectors consumed hundreds of gigabytes. I had to move the library folder to a dedicated ZFS HDD (700GB currently).

- ImageMagick uses 20GB RAM per Nikon RAW file (this triggered the Linux OOM-killer)

- Container crashes filled the OS drive with 2GB _per_ core dump.

I added `ulimits: core: 0` to the `docker-compose.yml` to stop core dumps and increased VM RAM to 48GB. I also added the following `.env` tweaks:

    ```
    NODE_OPTIONS=--max-old-space-size=8192
    VIPS_DISC_THRESHOLD=750m
    VIPS_CONCURRENCY=1
    MAGICK_MEMORY_LIMIT=8G
    MAGICK_MAP_LIMIT=4G
    ```

Also, make sure to limit max logging size in `docker-compose.yml` - this alone cleared up 17GB of logs that were generated in just 4 hours for me:

    ```yaml
        logging:
          driver: "json-file"
          options:
            max-size: "10m"
            max-file: "3"
    ```

Then, setup offsite backups with sanoid/syncoid zfs snapshots in pull zero-trust-mode (next evening project :)

jmathai•about 3 hours ago

Immich is such a wonderful piece of OSS software. I've replaced Google Photos with it. And then some.

For the nerds...https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/my-ridiculously-robust-pho...

cdrnsf•about 3 hours ago

I love this project — I replaced Apple photos with it and it's been smooth sailing the whole way through. I have a public proxy sitting in front of it as well (which it makes easy by letting you configure external sharing URLs), so I can share out password-protected or public galleries and accept uploads without exposing it directly.

bix6•about 3 hours ago

Any info on your public proxy setup?

bo0tzz•about 3 hours ago

Likely https://github.com/alangrainger/immich-public-proxy

cdrnsf•about 1 hour ago

I started there and ended up rewriting it in Preact/Go which is the direction I've been heading with the apps I maintain for myself.

turbocon•about 3 hours ago

Not the commenttor, however I personally am a big fan of Cloudflare tunnels.

ochronus•about 3 hours ago

Immich is wonderful, but if you're mostly looking for a solution to take your mind off the problem and don't want to self-host, try Ente photos.

inventor7777•about 1 hour ago

I gave Immich a fair try, but it could not replace Apple Photos for my use case. YMMV, but my favorite Photos app features simply weren't available.

I use Apple's top-notch editing for all sorts of stuff - RAW images, videos, basic enhancements, etc. When I tested, Immich didn't have very good, if any, editing features.

I also love Apple's search functions, and it Just Works™. I'm sure Immich has similar, but I know it would take a lot of processing to make it happen.

I also did not really care for Immich's UI, it felt overly basic and Material Design to me, but that is only personal preference.

Another gap is metadata. In Apple Photos I can tap the little "I" icon to see a lot of capture metadata, and in Immich I did not see an equivalent to how good Apple's one is.

drdexebtjl•about 1 hour ago

> I'm sure Immich has similar, but I know it would take a lot of processing to make it happen.

It’s less than you think! Consider that Apple’s image recognition happens on your phone. Also, it doesn’t matter if indexing is slow, as long as the photos are indexed before you need to search for them.

I used to run Immich on a 2nd gen Core i3.

ojdh•about 3 hours ago

Great project but I believe Google Photos pricing is quite reasonable and alluring.

I've always considered using something like this but the fact that it's backed up locally (to backup on cloud I have to pay for another service) and not accessible to my family kind of puts me off from setting up something like this

hamdingers•about 3 hours ago

Google Photos is a great value proposition, but it's still only 1 copy in 1 medium. If you count your phone as another copy/medium you still need a 3rd copy somewhere if you want to follow the 3-2-1 backup strategy.

> not accessible to my family

My family has no trouble with it, the UX is excellent. My retirement age parents are regularly adding photos to shared albums and things like that.

zidad•about 3 hours ago

Why would it not be accessible to your family? Immich allows sharing links

hobofan•about 3 hours ago

It is possible in general, but almost everybody doing self hosting (and as outlined in the article) does it on a local network and not on the internet. Most people that self host don't want to have to be a sysadmin in their free time in order to have a reasonable risk of not leaking all your families photos to the internet.

gf000•about 2 hours ago

There is an immich proxy project: https://github.com/alangrainger/immich-public-proxy

I wouldn't make the instance itself public, but I think this is a decent tradeoff. Of course still requires one to be a sysadmin.

LandoCalrissian•about 3 hours ago

I switched earlier this year and it has been really good. Exporting and uploading your google photos is a little time consuming because of the size, but other than that pretty pain free.

After using it for a while I actually prefer it to google photos and think it does quite a few things better. I would recommend switching for sure.

skrtskrt•about 3 hours ago

It drives me crazy that it shards your photos all over the place in opaquely named directories so you can’t actually find anything without its database index.

Photoprism is the best one I’ve found that will just take and index your folders as they are.

blmarket•about 3 hours ago

https://docs.immich.app/administration/storage-template/ is their best attempt to address your concern, but honestly I'm fine with navigating my photos solely using immich. (with annual backup copy stored in cold cloud storage)

drdexebtjl•about 3 hours ago

What do you mean opaquely named directories? It’s yyyy/yyyy-MM-dd/originalFileName. Those opaquely named files are the thumbnails.

Immich will also index your folders as they are. It’s called “External Libraries” in the documentation.

rootusrootus•about 3 hours ago

I believe that's a setting, you can have it store the files in a more predictable directory hierarchy. Though it's better to make that choice early on before doing a lot of imports.

pavel_lishin•about 4 hours ago

> The ability to upload photos from your device automatically

I don't think the article actually covers this; they mention installing the immich app on your device and uploading a photo, but it's not at all clear that this will automatically back up all photos taken on your phone.

tclancy•about 3 hours ago

It does and it’s seamless for me. Which takes the angst out of “should I keep this photo or video” once your phone is old and full out of the equation.

toomuchtodo•about 4 hours ago

Docs for context: https://docs.immich.app/features/mobile-backup/

https://github.com/immich-app/immich

_blk•about 3 hours ago

Easy read but indeed. That's what I read the article for. I'm very happy with Photoprism but the box is not always on and I'd like to keep a cached set of photos on my phone while also having automatic (multi-user) sync whenever the box is available..

bix6•about 3 hours ago

I’m currently using Photos Mobile with Synology but planning to setup Immich soon. The article doesn’t cover sharing which is the one hiccup in all this. Apple makes it so easy to share galleries and I don’t want to expose my NAS. Cost wise it’s close to parity if you backup offsite. But worth it to move out of their ecosystem. I literally did not have some of my original files since apple shifts things off disk to preserve storage space.

vanrohan•about 3 hours ago

Open Noodle is a fork of Immich which addresses the lack of Sharing: https://opennoodle.de/features/?category=sharing

preya2k•about 3 hours ago

Yeah, sharing is one of the big problems with Immich. You either need to expose your whole instance to make share links publicly accessible (and there's no way to secure user accounts with 2FA), or create user accounts for the people you want to share with and/or invite them and set up your VPN for them to access the shares.

There's https://github.com/alangrainger/immich-public-proxy, which is a weird workaround (it's a separate gallery frontend that syncs with your instance to only expose this specific service, so you can keep your Immich instane private).

toomuchtodo•about 3 hours ago

Is there a way to sponsor a feature request to improve the sharing and user auth story? Passkeys could be used here (versus MFA/2FA), because if the passkey is lost, you can simply delete it and have the known user go through the onboarding flow again to create a new passkey.

krupan•about 3 hours ago

One of the coolest things I've discovered with Immich is you can share an album link with a group of friends and they can all upload and download photos to/from that album without creating an account. It's way lower friction than anything else for sharing pics from a group activity or party or whatever.

oftenwrong•about 2 hours ago

The greatest weakness of Google Photos is that it has no real incremental, automated backup features. If it could incrementally sync over to other services, it would be much better. The closest is to manually use Google Takeout to export specific time ranges, and then copy those elsewhere.

tripleee•about 2 hours ago

Immich seems way too complex for what I need. Redis, Postgres and Docker just to look at your photos? Eugh

I just use Shotwell: https://shotwell-project.org/

bo0tzz•about 2 hours ago

Shotwell is great, but it's a single-machine photo organizer; I don't think you can really compare it to Immich on level ground.

_ink_•about 3 hours ago

Great project, saved my photos when the Pixel device wasn't as waterproof as promised.

oxedom•about 3 hours ago

I wrote my own blog about moving to self-hosting on Hetzner with Immich

https://www.sam-brink.com/posts/self-host

import•about 3 hours ago

Very curious about how frictionless is the Immich - iPhone / iCloud Photos sync, especially offloaded photos.

normalaccess•about 4 hours ago

Fantastic project. I have been using it for about a year and have had no problems yet. Building another box to deploy for family.

Muromec•about 3 hours ago

I'm using photoprism for a few years now, but the companion app on the phone is always the pain point.

hamdingers•about 3 hours ago

I made the switch from photoprism to immich a couple years ago and the app is far better. Sad to hear it hasn't improved in the mean time.

exabrial•about 3 hours ago

Can this sync when you migrate onto LAN?

toomuchtodo•about 3 hours ago

> By default, Immich will only upload photos and videos when connected to Wi-Fi. You can change this behavior in the backup settings page.

crtasm•about 3 hours ago

It can also optionally switch to connecting to a local ip/hostname when on your lan.

exabrial•about 3 hours ago

nice, thx!

delduca•about 3 hours ago

I use with borgbase and borgmatic

Noaidi•about 3 hours ago

As a retired semi-professional photographer I find it amazing how many photos some people have in their library. A mother with over 200GB of photos, 80% are junk, repeats, etc. She never looks at them either.

Most people would not need the storage they are using if the just took less photographs and edited more, but good on Immich.

oftenwrong•about 2 hours ago

That's me in a nutshell. I have close to 300GiB in Google Photos, mostly photos and videos of my children. I take a lot of photographs because getting a good shot, for me, is mostly a matter of luck. I don't delete that many photos because it's active work and I don't really care to spend the time. I do curate an album of decent ones, just so the few people who care can see new photos and videos every now and then. I pay a relatively small fee for 2 TiB of space.

carlosjobim•about 3 hours ago

"it’s now easier than ever"

Followed by 300 lines of obscure config commands and server configuration. Great...

My solution: I connect my iPhone once or twice a year and import my photos to a folder on my hard drive. Then I delete the old photos from the phone. That has worked fine for a couple of decades now.

Or you can use iCloud or Google Photos, which is about one dollar per month.

tclancy•about 3 hours ago

Horses for courses, but you’re comparing your best-case scenario to a worst-case Immich scenario. Admittedly I had a home lab box for it and am technical, but my effort was essentially pointing Claude at the Docker image and remembering a port number for setting up my phone.

Your solution, as presented, assumes you don’t lose any photos in six months and never go above the 2gb or so of space you get for a dollar. The impetus to finally set up Immich came from my wife pushing past that. Even at fifty cents a GB forever, it’s not going to scale as well as essentially 0, though that depends on considering the drive as a sunk cost.

And now I finally have to suck it up and establish an off-site backup plan to make my scenario like for like. Damn you!

yonatan8070•about 3 hours ago

Neither of your proposed solutions are really similar to Immich, the first is certainly private and secure, but you don't get many of the conviniences like location-based search, automatic face/object tagging, automatic OCR, etc.

Your second solution is much closer to Immich in terms of feature set, but (AFAIK) costs a bit more than 1$/month, depending on how much data you have. And it also doesn't match the privacy you'd get with Immich. Google will happily run your private photos through whatever AI model they feel like, without your permission or consent.

I'm not saying your solutions aren't good, if it works for you then great! But they're not really something you can compare to having an Immich instance

garbageman•about 3 hours ago

Use claude code or any other llm to set this up for you then

exe34•about 3 hours ago

I have Syncthing on my android phone, my laptop and my always-on nuc at home. There's a folder where I keep anything I want to backup.

iAMkenough•about 3 hours ago

Or you can use this and pay no dollar per month for an accessible indexed search of 12+ months of photos, not used to train AI models.

carlosjobim•about 3 hours ago

Yes, I already pay no dollar per month for storing my photos in a folder and it's not used to train any AI model.

jaymmartin•about 2 hours ago

I don't understand these types of comments. It's clear you don't value the features Immich provides. Can you not imagine someone else valuing them?

What are you trying to communicate to us? Maybe you are just trying to tell people that they can get away with simpler solution if all they care about is unscheduled photo backup. If so, I feel there is a less antagonistic way for you to say it.