This open-source app turns your Immich library into a memory game, and I've rediscovered photos I completely forgot I took

Published Aug 13, 2026, 7:00 PM EDT Dhruv Bhutani has been writing about consumer technology since 2008, offering deep insights into the personal technology landscape through features and opinion pieces. He writes for XDA-Developers, where he focuses on topics like productivity, networking, self-hosting, and more. Over the years, his work has also appeared in leading publications such as Android Police, Android Authority, CNET, PCMag, and more. Outside of his professional work, Dhruv is an avid fan of horror media spanning films and literature, enjoys fitness activities, collects vinyl records, and plays the guitar. As good as a self-hosted photo library is, it still doesn't solve the problem of discovery. When you've got a photo library spanning 200,000 images, you know you're not actively looking back at your memories unless you're seeking out a specific photo. I've previously dabbled in apps that surface Google Photos-style memories using Immich as the backend. But as good as it is, there's got to be a better way. That's what made Immich Mini Games interesting to me. This open-source app takes a completely unorthodox route to solving a very common problem. It connects to an existing Immich instance and uses the metadata it already generates to create a series of mini-games. Rather than endlessly scrolling through photos, you can then use these games to rediscover and interact with old photos. This might be the easiest way to rediscover parts of your self-hosted photo library that you'd completely forgotten about. Test your memory with people, places, and dates pulled from your own photo library A majority of the hard work here is done by Immich itself. Given the facial recognition, grouping, timestamps, and geolocation data, it makes no sense to parse all of it again. Instead, Immich Mini Games taps into that goldmine of information. This metadata serves as the backbone of a series of games that use facial recognition, GPS location, and EXIF data to quiz you on the people, locations, and timelines behind these photos. The biggest draw for me has been the people quiz. It's deceptively simple but a whole lot of fun in practice. The app shows a photograph from my library with a face blanked out. You then have to fill in the name of the person in that photograph. Immich Mini Games helps you populate that information with the same people data that you've defined within the photo app. The app even has a scoring system and a leaderboard to make it more competitive. The game might sound simplistic, but trust me, it gets pretty hard once you start going back a decade in the timeline and surface friends you've lost contact with. If you're looking for a tougher challenge, the date quiz is for you. With thousands of images spanning several years, it is easy to get confused if there are no recognizable markers in the image. The game asks you to enter a date for randomized photos and gives you a score based on how close you get to the actual date. It'll even tell you by exactly how many days or years you were off. Pretty neat. Elsewhere, if you like geoguessing, you'll love the similarly themed game. This one's fairly easy too. The game presents you with a photo and asks you to place a pin on the map at the image's original location. The closer you get, the higher the score. The most fun I've had with my photo library in years Immich's metadata turns every photo into a new gameplay opportunity I try out a lot of open-source apps, but Immich Mini Games has quickly become one of my favorites because it surfaces photos I'd normally never see. Anytime I dip into Immich, I'm either going through a recent vacation or looking for something specific. The games, however, are pulled randomly from my entire archive. Everything from family gatherings to trips with friends are represented here, making it a much more fun way to interact with your image library. You could even make a family night game out of it if you maintain a shared library. While most self-hosted software tends to solve a utility-based problem like backups, search, and organization, Immich Mini Games takes a very different approach by giving you a way to interact with an existing piece of software. It also helps that since the app taps into Immich's existing metadata, the experience improves every time you add to your library. Every new vacation or evening with friends is basically more data for the games to surface, so you know you'll never get bored of the entries. The other important aspect to me was security and safety. My Immich library is a rock-solid library of my photo data. I didn't want an app that could accidentally delete information or write back metadata. Immich Mini Games uses a standard API key, and you can completely disable write access to ensure that there's no possibility of it making changes to your library. A better way to revisit old photos and memories I run a lot of self-hosted tools and services in my home lab, but Immich ranks right up there as my favorite. It's replaced Google Photos for me and given me full control over my photo library. But what it hasn't been able to solve is the problem of reliving my memories. Immich Mini Games does, and it does so while building on top of the stellar base that Immich already has, rather than trying to replace it. Instead of leaving years of my photo memories sitting on a hard drive, the app gives me a reason to interact with my library and rediscover lost moments. It's safe to say that this open-source app has made using my Immich server far more enjoyable, and I'd definitely recommend checking it out. Immich Mini Games This open-source tool turns your Immich metadata into a series of mini games to relive old photo memories.