I use Immich as the family photo archive, not as a replacement for my phone’s cloud backup. Here is how that has gone.
The short answer
as an archive you own, Immich is very good. The import was smooth, search finds what I mean, and it grouped faces into people well. I would recommend it for that job. I have not replaced iCloud with it, and I would not until I have sorted out remote access and an offsite copy, both of which are still open in my setup.
What this review covers
- How I actually use it, and what I do not use it for
- The import, search and face recognition on a real library
- What it runs on and how fast
- What is missing in my setup, not in Immich
Where this comes from
this is my own Immich server. The numbers were read from it on 10 October 2026. The opinions are mine after five months. An earlier version of this page described a different, more ambitious setup than the one I run; this version replaces it.
How I use it
Immich holds a copy of the family’s photos and videos on hardware in my house. My phone still backs up to iCloud. Nothing new has gone into Immich since the import finished in May, on purpose: it is the archive, and iCloud is the live copy.
That matters for how you read this. I cannot tell you how reliable the mobile app’s background upload is, because I do not use it.
The library
| Items | 54,413 |
| Photos | 39,564 (75 GB) |
| Videos | 14,849 (846 GB) |
| Faces detected | 71,022 |
| People | 6,281 |
| Imported | 28 April to 5 May 2026 |
The import
Smooth. I pulled the library out of iCloud with icloudpd, an open-source downloader, into a folder on the NAS, then uploaded that folder with immich-go, a bulk upload tool for Immich. It read the dates from the photos themselves and skipped duplicates. The whole thing ran over about a week, mostly unattended.
I wrote up the two parts separately: moving iCloud photos with icloudpd and keeping the library on a NAS with the database on local disk.
Search
Good. Typing a plain description finds the right photos more often than not, which is the feature that makes a 54,000-item archive usable at all. On my server a search query takes a few hundredths of a second once the model is loaded. The first search after the server has been idle is slower, around twelve seconds, because the model has to load.
Faces
Good. Family members were grouped correctly without much tidying. The people count looks alarming, 6,281, but that is every stranger in the background of every holiday photo. The handful of people who matter were right.
What it runs on
Immich runs in Docker on an Intel NUC8i7BEH, a 2018 mini PC with a four-core i7 and 16 GB of memory, with no GPU acceleration. The photos live on a Synology DS723+ with two 8 TB drives mirrored.
I timed the machine learning on that box: the search model got through all 51,126 previews in under an hour, and face detection ran at about five photos a second. The method and full results are in Immich without a GPU. You do not need a graphics card for a library this size.
Upkeep
Low, with one catch. My server sat on version 2.7.5 for six months because the configuration pinned it to version 2, so normal updates never reached version 3. The upgrade itself took a few minutes and lost nothing. I wrote that up in why docker compose pull won’t update Immich to v3.
What is missing in my setup
None of these is Immich’s fault, and all three are why I call it an archive and not a replacement:
- It only works at home. I have not exposed it to the internet, because I am wary of opening my home network to reach a photo library.
- Storage is finite. The NAS volume is 7 TB and 4.5 TB is used.
- There is no offsite copy. The drives are mirrored and Immich dumps its database every night, but a fire or theft would take all of it. This is the one I should fix first.
Who it suits
Use it if you want your own copy of a large photo library, you have a small always-on computer and somewhere to store the files, and you are comfortable with Docker.
Think twice if you want it to replace your phone’s cloud backup on day one. That needs remote access you trust and a second copy somewhere else. I have neither yet, so I kept iCloud.
Verdict
Yes, as an archive. It did the hard parts well: getting five figures of photos in, making them searchable, and recognising the people in them, on modest hardware. What stands between it and being my only photo library is my own backup and network setup.
Your turn
Where do your family photos live?
Mine are in Immich at home, with the phone still backing up to iCloud. What about yours?
Keep reading
Immich without a GPU: timed on an Intel NUC
Immich GPU vs CPU: an RTX 2060 Super against two processors
Run Immich with your photos on a NAS and the database localAI assisted with gathering the figures and drafting this review. The server, the library and the opinions are mine.