Self-Hosting / Photos

Immich as a Real Google/iCloud Photos Replacement — Reviewed

Our full migration guide covers how to move a family's photo library onto Immich. This answers the separate question. After real, ongoing multi-account family use, is it any good? Yes. With two gotchas worth knowing before you commit a family's only copy of irreplaceable photos to the migration.

Why Immich specifically, over an all-in-one alternative

The obvious competing option for a self-hosted "replace everything Google and iCloud do" setup is one Nextcloud instance handling photos, contacts and calendar together. I picked Immich for photos instead, paired with a separate lightweight CalDAV and CardDAV server for contacts and calendar. Immich's photo experience is meaningfully better than Nextcloud's bundled Photos app. ML-powered search, real timeline browsing, face grouping. And the lighter dedicated calendar tool does not drag along a whole Nextcloud instance's worth of unrelated features for two functions. Separate best-in-class tools beat one tool doing everything adequately.

The real gotcha: new accounts can silently fail to log in on mobile

BE WARNED: a freshly created Immich account defaults to a "must change password" state that does not clear itself through the normal in-app change-password flow. The failure shows up as a confusing mobile login problem, not a "please change your password" prompt. It bit the very first admin account created, and it would have bitten every family member's account after that.

Fix: clear the flag through the admin API as soon as you create the account. Run PUT /api/admin/users/{id} with {"shouldChangePassword": false}. Do not wait to see whether it causes a problem. Make it a standard step every time you add a family member, not a fix after someone reports they cannot log in on their phone.

A near-miss during migration, not caused by Immich itself but worth knowing about

BE WARNED: uninstalling a Synology NAS's own Photos app can auto-delete its linked photo folder as a side effect. No warning dialog. Just gone. In a real case this was caught before it became permanent only because someone checked the folder right after uninstalling. About 145GB of irreplaceable family photos had already been renamed into a pending-deletion state.

The lesson generalizes. Never assume uninstalling an old app is a safe, inert cleanup step in a migration involving real data. Copy the underlying data folder aside by hand first. Copy, not move. Do it whether or not the app's uninstall process claims to leave data intact. "Uninstall this app" and "delete this app's data" are not always two separate steps the way you would expect.

The actual day-to-day experience

Past the initial setup, real multi-account family use has been genuinely good. Fast ML-powered search that finds things. A timeline that feels comparable to what it replaced. And a mobile app that, once the login bug above is cleared, reliably backs up photos from every family member's phone independently.

Verdict

A strong, confident replacement for Google and iCloud Photos. The photo experience holds up against what it replaces, which is not true of every self-hosted alternative in this space. Budget for the two gotchas above. Clear the password-change flag on every new account as a standing step. And treat any old photo app's data folder as something to safeguard by hand before uninstalling, not something the uninstall process can be trusted to leave alone.