YOU’LL NEED THIS
FREE AND OPEN SOURCE IMMICH SERVER SOFTWARE AND MOBILE APPS
(https://immich.app). The server software requires a PC running Docker with Docker Compose or Portainer also installed.
FED UP WITH HAVING TO BUY a monthly subscription to keep your photos and videos backed up online? If you’re willing to use your own backup server—whether your own PC or the NAS build we featured back in September 2022—then you can back up your entire family and friends’ photos and videos for free. Immich is a fresh, open-source server that’s rapidly developing to rival the likes of Google Photos and Apple iCloud.
First, Immich supports video, motion photos, and panoramas. You can upload from your computer (and thereby your digital camera) as well as your mobile devices, and it’ll recognize existing metadata like date and time information, as well as GPS coordinates to provide you with myriad different ways to view your photos. Immich even sports built-in facial detection technology that automatically links photos to the people in them.
In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to get Immich up and running, your photos uploaded, and take you on an extensive tour of its features. We’ll even show you how to use free software on your PC to add missing tags and ensure that your media is seen in its best light.
1 INSTALL IMMICH
Immich is distributed as a) are the logical ones to follow; if you set up the Portainer web-based frontend following our instructions in the October 2022 issue, go to to find out how to install it using Portainer’s stacks feature, as shown in [].
