I ditched Google Photos for Immich, but Google made the exit surprisingly painful

Published Jul 22, 2026, 8:00 AM EDT Oluwaniyi Raji is a tech content specialist who covers consumer technology, software, and digital tools. He has published over 300 articles for outlets including BGR (Boy Genius Report), MakeUseOf, TestGorilla, and Vervoe, focusing on helping readers make informed decisions about the technology they use. His work combines technical accuracy with practical buying advice. When he’s not writing, Oluwaniyi enjoys exploring new productivity tools and watching football. When I decided to ditch Google Photos, I thought the real challenge would be finding an alternative with the features I'd become used to. Between the constant warnings about reaching my storage limit and Google's general streak of anti-consumerism, I'd started to feel like Google Photos was holding my files hostage. Google makes a great prison, though. Features like map view, timelines, and facial recognition had become necessities for me. So I was tentative at first, partly because this wasn't my first time digging for a replacement. My last search hadn't turned up great results. Then I found Immich, a self-hosting solution I'd heard of but never looked into properly. The current version had the features I wanted and a solid Android app, and I felt like I'd won before I'd even started. Why I chose to give Immich v3 a shot It's mostly caught up to Photos Credit: Lucas Gouveia / Android Police As a self-hosted Google Photos alternative, Immich covers the basics you'd expect, including a capable Android app with automatic backup. A look through the official roadmap showed how far it had come since I last checked, and the recent additions were encouraging. Version 3.0, which landed right as I started, brought a lot of practical value, including on-the-fly video transcoding, OCR on mobile, in-app slideshows, and non-destructive editing that finally matched the web version on your phone. My quick tour of the changelog was enough to sell me, and I decided to switch as soon as I could. I knew some hardware and elbow grease were involved, but I figured that was the easy part to plan around. The migration process Where it all went sideways The hardware setup was the smooth part, since there are endless ways to build a self-hosted storage solution. With the server sorted, I assumed the photos would follow easily, but that's where I was wrong. Getting your library out of Google Photos means Google Takeout, and Takeout is the whole problem. There's no clean button that ports your account into Immich. When you request an export, Google hands you a pile of compressed archives large enough to need an external drive to stage. Extracting and uploading those should have been simple. The catch is that Takeout strips most of the useful metadata from each photo and dumps it into a matching JSON file that has to be reprocessed to put back your locations, dates, and albums. The fix is a community tool that reads those JSON sidecars during upload. The straightforward one is Immich-Go, an open source binary that doesn't need a package manager or Node.js, and it reattaches the metadata as it imports. There's also the official Immich CLI, which does the same job but wants Node.js and a bit more terminal setup, so I'd recommend the lighter tool to most people. Either way, you're working from a command line, which is friction on its own. Duplicates were the last hurdle. Google's export tends to spit out multiple copies of the same shot. While the import tool keeps the largest version, Immich runs its own visual duplicate detection in the background that you review afterward. All in all, it took two evenings out of my work week and a few missteps to get sorted. Then I told everyone else, and hit the next problem. How non-technical people fare Someone has to pick up the slack Credit: Lucas Gouveia / Android Police My friend, not tech-inclined in the slightest, decided from the start that I was wrong about being able to replace Google Photos, even after I walked through the plan. So I went about trying to prove it, saying nothing more until I was ready to set up the app on everyone's phones. No one else knows or wants to know what Docker is, so I became the administrator by default. I had to install Tailscale on every phone, explain why a routine update knocked out access for an hour, and field questions about the battery-optimization prompts that kept pausing uploads. It wasn't heavy friction, but the lesson was clear. Non-technical people need someone to run this for them, which is obvious in hindsight and something I hadn't considered before setting out. Immich has ground left to cover There's a solid roadmap Credit: Lucas Gouveia / Android Police | Kaspars Grinvalds / Shutterstock As good as Immich has become, there are still things you'll miss coming from Google Photos, and nearly all of them come down to Gemini. The generative tricks like Magic Eraser weren't seeing much use on our personal media, but plenty of people would be reluctant to give them up. Some people like Memories and the autogenerated story features, and others routinely use contextual search. Immich has versions of these, though they're less developed for now. None of it was a deal-breaker, and I've quickly adjusted. What helps is knowing several of these are already on the roadmap, so the gap should keep closing. Immich also supports connecting external AI editors, some of them better than Magic Eraser, but that's a test for another day. It works if you can get past the friction It's only been a few weeks, but I'm happy with how Immich is holding up, and a few others are on board too. I'll keep using Google Photos' Gemini integration for work, where I care as little as my coworkers do about how Google handles that data. For personal backups, I'm glad I switched, and I plan to stick with Immich as it improves. Aside from the occasional outage during an update, it just runs, and my friend has even started taking an interest in how our setup works under the hood.