Every photo and video on your phone is worth something to someone, just maybe not to you. Whoever is backing up your photos to the cloud is running your face through recognition models, scanning your location history, and training AI on your family’s memories, quietly, in the background, while you pay them every month for the privilege. I got tired of that arrangement a while back, which is part of why I already run a home server. Now that same server backs up every photo and video from my phone too, and I own the whole thing.
Hopefully I didn’t scare you! Read On!
The app doing the work is called Immich, and it’s free and open source. Think of it as your own private Google Photos, except it runs on hardware you own instead of a server farm you’ll never see. I run it on my TrueNAS box, the same machine that already handles Plex for my movies and music, so it slotted right into a setup I was already running.
The App Just Runs in the Background
Immich has a mobile app for both iPhone and Android, and once you install it and point it at your own server, it quietly backs up every new photo and video as you take them. I’m running an iPhone 17 Pro, and it grabs everything, including the big video files that eat up storage the fastest. It works the same way on older iPhones and on Android too. You set it up once and forget about it.
The Real Reason I Started Caring About This: Storage
Here’s the part that actually got me to set this up. Video eats phone storage faster than almost anything else, and if you shoot much of it, you know that “iPhone storage full” message always shows up right when you need to take something important. Once Immich has backed a photo or video up to my own server, I can delete it off the phone and get that space back, and I still have the original, full quality, sitting safely at home. No more choosing between deleting memories or paying for more cloud storage every month/year.
It’s Not Just Storage, It’s Actually Smart About It
Immich runs its own AI locally to organize everything, and it holds up well against what the big cloud photo services do, just without your data leaving your house to make it happen. Search “beach” and it finds your beach photos. Search a person’s name and it groups their face across years of photos automatically. Searcha cat, there a cat!, LOL
There’s a map view that plots where every photo was taken, so you can scroll back through a trip just by browsing the map. All of that runs on my own hardware. No subscription, no cloud processing, no company on the other end learning anything about my and your life, f them is what I say and you should be also thinking this, if you are not, you are a fool!
Worth Setting Up
If you already have a home server running for something else, adding Immich is a weekend project at most. If you don’t, it’s still worth considering, because the alternative is paying a subscription forever for something that’s quietly mining your family photos in the background, your kids, your wife, your pets, did I scare you yet ? LOL
I don’t know about you, but I’d rather own my own memories outright, and now my phone’s storage stays free for whatever I actually want to shoot next. Give it a try.