For years, Google Photos was the easiest part of my online life. Every picture I took automatically landed in the cloud, faces got tagged without me lifting a finger, and a quick search for "beach" or "dog" brought up exactly what I wanted. But the convenience came with a steep hidden cost: my entire photo library, including thousands of private family images, was sitting on someone else's servers. That made the trade-off clear to me: I was handing over a massive personal history to a tech giant that has every incentive to analyze it, monetize it, or change the terms of the deal whenever it wants. That trade-off finally stopped feeling worth it, so I left Google Photos behind. I've since tried a few different homes for my library, including Sync.com's encrypted cloud storage. This time, I wanted to go a step further: no third party at all, encrypted or not. So I moved my library to Immich. What is Immich, and how does it replace Google Photos? Core features that replace Google Photos' best tools Immich is a self-hosted photo and video management platform built to feel like a drop-in replacement for Google Photos or Apple's iCloud Photos. You run it on your own machine (a server, a NAS, a spare PC, or, in my case, a laptop) and install a companion app on your phone. The app automatically backs up new photos and videos to your server over Wi-Fi, just like the Google Photos app backs them up to the cloud. Once your images land on the server, Immich handles the heavy lifting you're used to: - Facial recognition, which clusters photos by the people in them, so you can browse by face rather than by date - Object and scene detection, so you can search for "sunset"