I replaced Google Photos and OneDrive with my own server, and it made me realize I never needed the cloud

Published Aug 20, 2026, 5:00 PM EDT João has been covering the tech world for over 7 years, with a heavy focus on laptops and the Windows ecosystem. I also love all things tech and videogames, especially Nintendo, which he's always happy to talk about. Prior to joining XDA in 2021, he worked at Neowin: https://www.neowin.net/news/poster/jo%C3%A3o-carrasqueira/ For years, OneDrive was where I stored most of my photos, while my wife typically relied on Google Photos for the same purpose. That was until I discovered the wonderful world of self-hosting, and with it, Immich. In the past year or so, Immich has replaced both OneDrive and Google Photos for my family, and frankly, I haven't missed the cloud at all. My personal "cloud" is all I need. Immich is surprisingly good The user experience is better than I thought When I was first getting into self-hosting, one of my big fears is that this software just wouldn't be up to snuff with what Google Photos or even OneDrive can offer. And in some ways, you can make that argument, but overall, Immich nails the feature set and capabilities almost perfectly. Maybe some more advanced features I don't need are missing but when it comes to storing, organizing, and browsing my photos, it's perfect. The entire UI is very inspired by Google Photos (and Google's Material Design in general), and it looks and feels great. The default page shows all your photos in a timeline, and you can see the dates in the scroll bar, so you can easily jump to a specific point in time to find the memories you're looking for. You can also use the map feature to see photos by location (if they have metadata). One of my favorite parts is being able to create albums, which lets me group together pictures of the same vacation, trip, or event. It's a basic feature, but it works pretty well, and it helps that the UI is far smoother than OneDrive. Probably the biggest thing I didn't expect Immich to do, though, is identify people. There's a machine learning component to Immich that runs entirely on my own server, but it can still recognize people's faces and gather their pictures into one place. It's not perfect, but you can also merge profiles together, so if a person is recognized as two different people, they all become one, and it helps future photos be correctly identified, too. Owning my photos Everything runs locally The idea that Google can actually access your files or use them for their own purposes is something of a conspiracy theory, but it is nice to feel like you have full control over your data. Google's policies may dictate that it won't be looking at your pictures, but who's to say those policies will never change? After all, companies seem desperate to gobble up as much training data as possible for AI, so it wouldn't exactly be surprising. Running all of this on my own server gives me a bit more peace of mind, and it allowed my wife and I to finally come together on what service to use. She loved the interface of Google Photos, but I was always (perhaps irrationally) more wary of Google's handling of user data than Microsoft's, so I was more keen on OneDrive. With Immich, we both finally felt comfortable enough to move, and now we have our data on the same server. That's not to say our photos aren't in the cloud at all, but we're backing these photos up to Backblaze, which is a very different kind of cloud storage service. There are no features aside from just storage: no AI capabilities to train or enable, no easy way to consume content off of the cloud, nothing of the sort. I have much more trust in the safety of my data on Backblaze than either Google Drive or OneDrive. I can access it from anywhere With the right setup, that is A downside you might expect with running your own server is how you're going to access it when you're not home, all while keeping it safe. Exposing your services to the internet is generally not the best idea, but using a service like Tailscale, you can route traffic back to your home network while keeping it away from the wider internet. And since the Immich app also supports automatic backups, I can even ensure that all my photos are automatically saved in my personal server while I'm out and about. I actually don't do this, I prefer being intentional about which photos I save, but my wife always has automatic backups on, and Immich always stays up to date. The underlying structure can be messy And sharing is difficult, too For all its benefits, one thing that can be finicky about Immich is how the files are actually stored. You won't see this structure while using Immich, but if you try to access your server via SMB or you're backing up your files like I am, you'll see that they're stored in a way that makes them impossible to browse with a typical file manager. Each photo has its own folder, names are complete gibberish, and it's just a mess. That said, you can create storage templates, which let you change how files are stored by creating folders for each month, day, and so on. It's a fine solution, though I've also read that using a storage template can also create some complications when upgrading to a newer version of Immich, so I've stayed away from it. Immich can also be problematic when updating itself, even without storage templates. I've had a couple of situations where the server failed to update because it required a new version of Postgres and it wasn't able to update itself, which meant I had to do some more manual work to proceed with the update. Using your own server can also make it harder to share files with people outside your home, but for my personal files, I actually don't need to do this often enough to care. If I do want to share something, I can download it and then share it through a messaging app, and that works fine for me. Immich is great Self-hosting as a whole has been a very rewarding journey for a variety of reasons, and Immich is one of the best things I've gotten out of it. I love that I can access my photos and videos from anywhere while keeping them securely stored at home, without having to depend on cloud services from Microsoft or Google. I thought I might miss some features from these companies, but Immich is very robust, so I really don't. Immich Key highlights Self-hosted iOS compatible Yes Android compatible Yes