A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
Be civil.
No spam.
Posts are to be related to self-hosting.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or readme if you're providing a link.
Submission headline should match the article title.
No trolling.
Promotion posts require active participation, with an account that is at least 30 days old. F/LOSS without a paywall has exceptions, with requirements. See the rules link for details. Tags [CBH] or [AIP] are required, see the links in Rule 8 for details.
AI-related discussions and AI-involved promotional posts have additional requirements for tagging, as noted in Rule 7 and the AI & Promotional Post Expanded Rules post, and find example disclosures here.
Resources:
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
I just moved from v2 immich to v3.
Literally changed the version in my env file and then deleted all docker images.
I then pulled all images and brought all containers online.
0 issues.
Immich has been running really well for us on my n100 for 10 months now. I did dual Google photos and immich for a 3 months and then exported out from gphotos.
I started 2026 with immich only. Been rock solid the entire time.
Of course that's all anecdotal and ymmv. But immich is fantastic
Pretty much the exact same experience here. I just removed my wife's photo storage from Google completely as of this month π. Don't even need the security blanket anymore. Immich is it.
I had a mini panic when moving from v2 to v3 was not automatic today, but it was a 15 minute fix, that was mostly just reading the step-by-step instructions for the update. Copy-pasted a handful of lines and we're off!
Haha I had a much harder time with the compose formatting than I did with the actual upgrade.
Line
Or
Line.?
Either way fuck you compose. Haha
Good to know. it's very tempting. It has every feature we need, and it integrates to every other relevant app I selfhost.
Do you keep a backup? How do you do it?
Immich is great. I run a small friends and family instance on a NAS and Iβve never had a hiccup that took more than ten minutes to fix. My backup system is borg to a Hetzner storage box nightly with a healthchecks.io check set to email me if it goes more than 48 hours without a success. Cheap, reliable, and fast enough for me.
Yea I changed over to v3 without issue recently too, I read the release notes and some of the issue conversations on github, so I knew what to expect.
That's something a lot of people dont do, if you are self hosting an open source project it's on you to stay on top of those things, stay updated as much as possible but dont do major jumps blindly without backups.
In my case, I went from a regular immich in a container to one with openVino built in for gpu accelerated image analysis and face detection, and I had to change my database container image. Then it fired straight up and everything seems to work 100% so far.
I'm running Immich as a TrueNAS app. Unfortunately after upgrading to v3 the immich container is stuck on starting, without outputting any logs. Haven't had the time to debug yet though.
You might need to changw the PostgreSQL Version if you are still on an oder one. Roll back to 2.x, make sure it runs, edit the App to use the new PG, Start, Update to 3.0
Immich
Downside: breaking changes are fairly common AFAIK
Uh... that's news to me. I've been hosting 2 user's photos for 1.5 years with absolutely zero breaking changes. I just updating from v2 to v3 and nothing broke.
I briefly checked out Ente, but personally I have zero trust for any project that requires users to sign a CLA to contribute like Ente: https://github.com/ente/ente/pull/11084#issuecomment-4762402896
Immich doesn't do those shenanigans: https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/7023#discussioncomment-8433346
CLAs are bad because the project can change the license whenever they feel like it. So Ente is effectively reserving the right to go full evil with their CLA.
Whereas Immich can't suddenly decide they want to move away from AGPLv3.
Ok, wow. Well, that kinda wraps it up for me. Fuck CLAs.
immich hasnt had any major breaking changes for a while in my experience using it for a few years, anything that does break is probably some third party integration or plugin that would have to wait for it's own maintainer to fix, that's pretty normal in the open source world.
Photoprism users every time this topic comes up
I switched from photo prism after 12 months on it, to immich. Much prefer it and offers more and better features from my perspective.
Yeah I might switch over too because immich didn't originally have some of the sort and detection features like Photoprism.
Photoprism is pretty good but it doesn't have some of the nicer UI features immich has.
Also, accounts. Long promised for community or lowest tier then integrated only in the expensive tier of photoprism IIRC, which made me switch because that only then works for individuals.
LOL π
photoprism is good. i ran it for a few years before running both immich and photoprism side by side, and eventually shut down photoprism and moved entirely over to immich. i'd never give anybody flak for using photoprism, but for people starting from scratch i'd strongly recommend immich.
Immich released it's first "stable" version. They mean to have fewer breaking changes and prioritize compatibility.
https://immich.app/blog/v2.0.0-release
I highly recommend.
Downside: breaking changes are fairly common AFAIK.
This is no longer the case after the version 2.0 release. Version 2.0 is the stable release: https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/22546
Funny enough I had to rollback, since it doesn't start in the latest version in my setup. I have to make a conscious effort to keep it one or two subversions behind. It is not the first time an upgrade breaks my install. It will probably be a whole thing when I decide to actually upgrade it again.
Downside: breaking changes are fairly common AFAIK.
Breaking changes only come with major version changes now.
I do still read the changelogs and compare compose files thoroughly on every major update. With that in place, Immich has not once broken down on me, and I've been here from almost the very start.
Oh, same here. As soon as I discovered Immich, I pored through all the info I could get my hands on and found that breaking changes happened often, so I made absolutely certain to read every changelog for things that may affect my setup. I sstopped updating it last year due to life getting in the way, and it was stuck on 1.138 (and shut off) until last week when I decided to pay attention to it again.
Downside: breaking changes are fairly common AFAIK.
By my extremely cursory reading, this stopped being a problem after the v2.0.0 release, when they adopted semantic versioning. According, breaking changes would only occur when the major version number is rolled. And version v3.0.0 was just released 5 days ago, whereas v2.0.0 was released in October 2025.
It may be down to taste, but I view 9 months as being acceptable, given the breadth of features offered and the folks willing to put effort into the project.
Running immich since 2 years, never had a single breaking issue or instability of any kind.
There is really no reason not to choose immich unless you prefer something that's only in ente.
I use Ente, but itβs purely because I want my images backed up in the cloud, but I donβt want the server provider to be able to mess around with them. Hence the e2ee being important to me.
I love Ente, I think itβs a great project, but for self-hosting, immich seems like the best choice to me.
Just a FYI, when using a tool like rclone to backup data to some cloud, it can also encrypt the files for you when pushing data, and decrypt when pulling data. Of course, the files will still be unencrypted at rest.
That's very neat! It doesn't really work for my Ente use-case, but definitely good to know!
It wasn't rsync that started breaking because of some Claude changes, right?
I think it was rsync indeed. Afaik rclone and rsync are different developers, despite the name
Kind of. Claude helped the developer find lots of bugs. He decided to start making major changes to fix these bugs. Major changes often break things.
Echoing what others have said, Immich hasn't had breaking changes in a while. That being said it's one of the services I keep it on a pinned version and read release notes before updating.
Immich is just fantastic. Probably one of the best software in the self-hosting world. I had no problems with breaking changes in the last ~1,5 years I'm using it.
The big difference is that ente is encrypted.
If you use FDE, Immich is also encrypted but only at rest.
Using immich for like 4 years and it never broke down. Migration steps are always super clear.
Ente i got for my parents as an alternative to iCloud photos and until I figure out some tunneling.
I've been pretty happy with ente after moving from immich a year or two ago when the breaking changes were basically every time I opened the app on my phone.
Can't comment on ente. I looked at it originally along with many others and initially chose photo prism. Ran that for around 6 months then switched to immich. Have no plans on changing any time soon. I host 4 users on it. It works great, been using it over 12 months so been on it from v1, and been through all the changes to V2 and V3 and never had a breaking change. Have auto updates in in podman for it so I never manually touch it. It just works.
Ente is a pain to setup, was never meant to be selfhostable correctly
Admittedly I don't know anything any Ente, but I'm extremely satisfied with Immich. Haven't upgraded to v3 yet but will be soon
There is also photoprism although its become less popular than immich over the last year or two. What are your requirements? That would help folks give you good recommendations.
My experience with ente was that it is horribly slow. It also lacks any feature to upload a large number of photos at once. I just never bothered uploading my 10k pictures I have taken over the last 15 years because it would have had to transfer them to a phone and then have the app open for a few weeks. No rclone or any other reasonable way to upload from a computer other than browser (which just doesn't work for more than a few images)
Iβve tried both and had favored Ente for months but I eventually drifted towards Immich. The most obvious reason is that Ente isnβt optimal for self hosting. And itβs rather proof of concept to show they are committed to openness. On the other hand, Immich is built for self hosters.
Ente has client side encryption. That why I initially committed in order to respect privacy of my users. So if you care about the users. Go for it.