I ditched Google Photos for Immich, but one feature pulled me back after a month

Published Jul 20, 2026, 8:00 AM EDT Korbin is a Linux system administrator who spends most of his time in a terminal figuring out how things actually work. Over the last decade he's written hundreds of articles about Linux configuration, troubleshooting weird problems, and using open-source tools in the real world. He also works a lot with Windows systems and networking, especially in mixed environments where things don't always behave the way the documentation says they should. Writing things down is how he makes sense of it all and hopefully saves someone else a few hours. Self-hosting Immich is a common theme I see across homelab channels. It's extremely popular in that crowd, and a few people even proclaim that Immich has killed Google Photos. I've made a habit of leaving Google's ecosystem behind, one piece at a time, over the last few years, so I wanted to see if that held up for my personal photo library. The migration was surprisingly easy. I configured my phone to back up its photo roll to my home server instead of Google Photos, then deleted Google Photos completely, and lived with Immich as my only photo app for a month. Immich handled all of the basics very well, giving me fast uploads and built-in AI that recognizes the people, scenery, and objects in my photos, so that I can easily search for them. After a few weeks, though, I began to notice that some of the niceties I'd grown accustomed to in Google Photos weren't present in Immich, or they didn't work the way I wanted. It made full adoption of Immich a little harder than I expected, and there are several features in Google Photos that I still miss. Google's Ask Photos feature is so good It's the quickest way to pull up a very specific photo Ask Photos lets me query my entire photo archive in an intuitive way: I can just ask a question in plain English and get an answer based on my own photos. So, I can ask it something like "what kind of French food did I try when I was in Paris," and it'll sift through my photos, pull out the relevant meals, and summarize them. I seriously love that feature because it feels like I can just take photos and always have a queryable record of what I saw or did, without ever actually taking the time to make a note of them myself. Just snap a photo and ask Google about it later. I used this far more than I realized before I gave it up. The perfect example of its usefulness is when I asked it to find the model number off a water filter I'd photographed months earlier, and it just told me the answer, without me trying to extract the information myself. That's a boring way to showcase its convenience, but it saved me a lot of time, and I'd grown to rely on it for that. Immich's search is good, too, but by comparison, it feels like being back in the Stone Age when typing in keywords like "dog at the beach" and "birthday cake" to find what I'm looking for. Even when it pulls up the photos I want, it doesn't go the extra step of extracting information from them to answer questions about what I'm trying to find. It'll return you a grid of photos that match a keyword you typed, then expect you to comb through them to get whatever you were after. I'm not sure if Immich can catch up to a feature like that, either, since it'd take impressive hardware to power a model that can discern details from each photo and hold a conversation about them the way that Google Photos can. Immich's machine learning is limited by the outdated GPU I have in my NAS, so I don't expect a comparable search feature in my self-hosted setup. It's a compromise for sure, since Google can use a huge cloud model to process my whole photo library, and my Immich setup simply can't. Google Photos bundles AI editing And Immich doesn't let me change a single pixel I don't really like generative AI, but I do find it helpful for eliminating unwanted artifacts from my photos. Google Photos lets you describe an edit that you want to make, and Gemini just does it. I feel like it's "cheating" or something to have AI insert new stuff into my pictures, but it's not offensive to use it for removing strangers from my photo of the Colosseum. For people who like to make crazier edits, Google Photos would be even harder to give up. For me, though, I just miss the ability to delete a tourist out of my otherwise perfect photo in a matter of seconds. Editing photos in my Immich library requires an extra step: exporting the photo to an AI app or opening it in image-editing software. That detour into a separate app to finish the job complicates the workflow, so I'm making fewer edits than I did with Google Photos. By the same token, Immich doesn't do any auto-generated highlight videos or collages like Google builds for me. And although "orange cat" in the search bar does bring up photos of my cat, I can't group them by a pet's name the way I can in Google Photos. None of these minor inconveniences is a big deal on its own, but they add up. Let's talk about the main reason people switch Immich has one untouchable advantage: privacy Google Photos has a lot of elegant features that Immich can't replicate. On the other hand, Immich addresses an issue that most self-hosters consider paramount: privacy. All of my private photos are hosted on Google's servers, and its AI models can read them with unnerving precision, so there's no doubt Google knows absolutely everything I'm up to. For most Immich users, this is the point that makes the lack of luxurious features worth it. I already trust cloud AI with plenty of other tasks, as I'm sure most people do these days, so drawing a hard line at photo privacy seems a little arbitrary. There are some personal photo albums I have Google Photos skip, and those go exclusively to Immich's library. I also let Immich absorb everything anyway, as I'm not about to trust Google to keep thousands of sentimental photos safe. If nothing else, Immich is a great backup, but I still reach for Google Photos for the features I don't want to give up. Immich is staying, but I'm also using Google After a month, I consider Immich to be my primary photo library, and I don't regret implementing it. The one thing that occasionally pulls me back to Google is Ask Photos, since nothing in Immich yet replicates that kind of conversational memory. The right combo for me is using Immich's privacy for most of my photos and accepting Google as a necessary substitute for the times I need something it offers alone. Immich Key highlights Self-hosted iOS compatible Yes Android compatible Yes Immich is a self-hosted photo and video backup solution.