The topic I ditched iCloud for Immich, and my photo library finally feels like it’s… is currently the subject of lively discussion — readers and analysts are keeping a close eye on developments.
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After finally giving my home lab a proper makeover, complete with a shiny new case and a couple of 8 TB drives for a NAS share, I decided it was time to start axing some subscriptions. That amount of storage can save me a significant amount of money every month, so I started with the data that took up the most space: my iCloud photo storage.
For a long time, I treated the integrated Photos app as the obvious, default hub for every photo on my phone, the way almost all iPhone owners do. Now that I’m using my own storage, though, Immich has become the new home for my photos, and while it does have some quirks, the level of polish is at a point where it’s intuitive enough to use for my non-techie family, meaning it’s finally time we can replace our entire iCloud backup scheme for good.
With iCloud, every image I’d taken sat on Apple’s servers, governed by Apple’s terms, accessible on Apple’s schedule. The vast majority of the time, there’s no issue with this arrangement, and I’m not going to pretend like I’m above total convenience. I have used iCloud for years, but since I’ve finally acquired the means to take control of my photo library, making the switch comes with perks that go deeper than convenience.
As is the case with any cloud-based storage scheme, a locked Apple Account can cut you off from a decade of memories with no easy appeal, and the terms you agreed to can change without your input. Self-hosting my photos means the library now lives on a drive I own, in a box I built, and nobody can revoke my access to it. There’s no third party in the loop deciding what I can store or for how long, and while it’s true that Apple would be the one tech giant I’d personally trust with general privacy measures, hosting locally means everything is only as exposed as I want it to be, and that’s true peace of mind.
Apple’s free iCloud tier is famously stingy at 5GB, which is barely enough for a modern phone to back up a single good weekend. The model is designed to push you onto a paid plan, and once you’re there, the bill only ever grows as your library does. You’re effectively paying rent on your own memories, forever.
Immich is a self-hosted app that allows you to store and categorize photos in a way that’s much more polished than a big folder on a NAS share somewhere. You can run it in a container in your home lab, on a mini PC, or even on your NAS, and it does a lot of the hard work for you once it’s up and running. I run it in a Proxmox LXC, and setup only took about 10 minutes, which included pulling the docker-compose.yml, editing the .env file, and before I knew it, I was already logging into the web UI.
In daily use, it covers a lot of the same bases as Apple’s solution does: categorizing by year, incredibly fast scrolling photos and loading of videos, and search is pretty close to the first-party experience. You can search for things like “beach” or “dog” and it will return competent results, though they don’t seem to order them by date, which is a bit annoying. Besides that though, everything is here. Albums, face detections, sharing via links, multiple user accounts for the household, and the list goes on.
And then there are the things iCloud structurally won’t give you: external libraries, full control over how and where files are stored, an open API to build against, and zero lock-in. I can move my data whenever I want, and configuring remote access is as simple as having a VPN scheme setup, though it’s not necessary unless you’re obsessed about backing up like I am.
The biggest day-to-day compromise, and it’s specific to iPhone, is background syncing. iCloud uploads your photos invisibly and continuously at the operating-system level, but doesn’t let Immich do the same. Immich depends on Background App Refresh, and is at the whim of whether iOS lets it run that task. In practice, it means that new photos sometimes sit on the phone for a while, and the only way to force a sync is to open the app. Thankfully, that’s all you have to do; there’s no manual sync button that you need to press if you’ve got automatic syncing enabled.
The bigger responsibility is backups. The day my photos left iCloud, redundancy became my job, and a single Immich instance on one drive is not a backup scheme. I have two 8 TB SAS drives running a ZFS mirror, which protects me against drive failure at the minimum. A cold storage backup of photos from 2 years ago and beyond would be advisable beyond this, as well. On top of that sit the rest of the self-hosting tax items: keeping the server updated, keeping it online, setting up secure remote access so I can reach my photos away from home, and the initial migration out of iCloud, which Apple has no incentive to make pleasant.
None of those costs turned out to be deal-breakers, mostly because they’re front-loaded. The setup, from hosting to completing a sync, took an afternoon, and if you’re building a system specifically for this, it doesn’t need to be incredibly powerful, but a dedicated GPU and competent CPU does help. Your storage scheme you choose to use could be something as simple as a couple of old 1 TB HDDs you pulled out of your old gaming rigs, or it could be a purpose-built NAS.
The iOS sync quirk has practical fixes: enable Background App Refresh for Immich, keep Low Power Mode off, and let the phone do its uploading on Wi-Fi while charging, which is exactly when you’d want it to anyway. Opening the app every so often closes the gap, and the project is actively working toward newer iOS background APIs that should narrow it further.
If the appeal of owning and maintaining a server is lost on you, I don’t blame you. Self-hosting isn’t the right move for everyone, but if you’re willing to trade in a bit of convenience for a little bit of responsibility, you can have a photo library that has practically all the same bells and whistles as Apple and Google’s solution with no monthly fee.