Backups
Photos and videos are usually irreplaceable. Unlike most self-hosted data, there is no upstream copy to re-download and no way to recreate a lost photo — which makes backups the single most important part of running Immich.
Comparison
If you're new here and came from other asset self-hosting alternatives you might want to look at a comparison between Immich and your current solution.
Duplicate detection
Duplicate detection relies on machine learning and is enabled by default. It compares the search embeddings Immich already generates for contextual search, which is why it finds assets that look alike rather than only byte-identical files — a resized or re-encoded copy of a photo is still detected.
External libraries
Currently an external library can only belong to a single user which is selected when the library is initially created.
Facial recognition
Immich detects faces in your photos and videos, then groups the detected faces into people. Two separate machine learning steps are involved, and this page explains what each one does and how the settings that control them interact. For the day-to-day actions — naming, merging, hiding people — see Browse and manage people.
Mobile Backup
Overview
Monitoring
Immich exposes performance metrics so an instance can be observed locally. The integration is primarily Prometheus metrics, though exporting traces is also possible because the instrumentation uses OpenTelemetry.
Remote Access
This page gives a few pointers on how to access your Immich instance from outside your LAN.
Reverse Geocoding
Reverse geocoding turns the coordinates stored in a photo into place names — city, state, and country. Immich does this locally using a copy of the GeoNames geographical database that lives in your own Postgres database, so no coordinates are ever sent to a third-party service.
Scaling
Immich is built to scale. Rather than a single process doing everything, the server is divided into independent workers, and most of the actual work is expressed as jobs that are queued and processed in the background. That division is what makes it possible to run Immich on one small machine or spread it across several.
Sharing
Immich has three distinct ways to give someone access to assets, and they differ in who the recipient is, how much of the library they reach, and what they can do with it.
System Integrity
Integrity report
Versioning
Immich follows semantic versioning, which tags releases in the format ... Breaking changes, including those to the API or to deployment, are intended to be limited to major version releases.