Ditch Google Photos: Self-Host Immich on an Old PC and Save $20–$30 a Month

Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage

▲ 92speckx102 HN discussion
Ditch Google Photos: Self-Host Immich on an Old PC and Save $20–$30 a Month

Tired of paying $20–$30 a month for Google Photos storage? If you have an old computer lying around, you can set up Immich—a free, open-source photo management server—and keep your library on your own hardware. This guide walks through installing Docker, configuring Immich with just two files, and connecting from your phone or browser. You'll get automatic uploads, search, and a familiar interface, plus tips on backing up your photos and options for remote access.

If you have an older computer lying around and want to save money, it’s now easier than ever to have a functioning “cloud” that you own for photo management.
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  1. drdexebtjl

    I use Immich, but saved me money it has not.

    Unless you actually go through the "Backing up your photos" step, you _will_ lose your photos, it's just a matter of time. And if you're like most people, that is probably not acceptable.

    And by the time you do the math for the cost of your backups, you'll find Google Photos pricing is actually pretty good.

    Still worth it, imo.

  2. ValtteriL

    I made the jump to Immich a month ago after having to prune my Drive more and more often as my free Drive quota ran totally out after 8 years of freeloading.

    My homelab had spare capacity and I had already offsite backups to Hetzner Storage Box sorted out so it didn't take long or increase my costs.

    Very good experience so far. I moved all my photos including multiple complete wedding albums to it, something I couldn't do with Drive without "converting". Nice to finally have all the Google Photos goodies for everything.

    Shout out to immich-go, a cli tool for bulk uploads from Google takeout archives.

  3. Helmut10001

    I love immich! On board since June 2026. But, here's a brief report on my evening installation project.. setting up Immich: Ingesting a 1.7TB library (160k+ RAW photos) is apparently not a standard task!

    - Thumbnails and ML vectors consumed hundreds of gigabytes. I had to move the library folder to a dedicated ZFS HDD (700GB currently).

    - ImageMagick uses 20GB RAM per Nikon RAW file (this triggered the Linux OOM-killer)

    - Container crashes filled the OS drive with 2GB _per_ core dump.

    I added `ulimits: core: 0` to the `docker-compose.yml` to stop core dumps and increased VM RAM to 48GB. I also added the following `.env` tweaks:

    ```

    NODE_OPTIONS=--max-old-space-size=8192

    VIPS_DISC_THRESHOLD=750m

    VIPS_CONCURRENCY=1

    MAGICK_MEMORY_LIMIT=8G

    MAGICK_MAP_LIMIT=4G

    ```

    Also, make sure to limit max logging size in `docker-compose.yml` - this alone cleared up 17GB of logs that were generated in just 4 hours for me:

    ```yaml

    logging:

    driver: "json-file"

    options:

    max-size: "10m"

    max-file: "3"

    ```

    Then, setup offsite backups with sanoid/syncoid zfs snapshots in pull zero-trust-mode (next evening project :)

  4. jmathai

    Immich is such a wonderful piece of OSS software. I've replaced Google Photos with it. And then some.

    For the nerds...https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/my-ridiculously-robust-pho...

  5. cdrnsf

    I love this project — I replaced Apple photos with it and it's been smooth sailing the whole way through. I have a public proxy sitting in front of it as well (which it makes easy by letting you configure external sharing URLs), so I can share out password-protected or public galleries and accept uploads without exposing it directly.

  6. ochronus

    Immich is wonderful, but if you're mostly looking for a solution to take your mind off the problem and don't want to self-host, try Ente photos.

  7. LandoCalrissian

    I switched earlier this year and it has been really good. Exporting and uploading your google photos is a little time consuming because of the size, but other than that pretty pain free.

    After using it for a while I actually prefer it to google photos and think it does quite a few things better. I would recommend switching for sure.

  8. pavel_lishin

    > The ability to upload photos from your device automatically

    I don't think the article actually covers this; they mention installing the immich app on your device and uploading a photo, but it's not at all clear that this will automatically back up all photos taken on your phone.

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