Get Your Family Photos Out of Google With a Box in the Closet

The Storage Full Popup

You know the one. ‘Your Google storage is almost full.’ Then you’re paying every month to keep your own photos, and that bill only goes one direction as the kids get older and the camera roll gets bigger.

There’s another option. You can run your own photo service at home, with automatic backup from your phone, face recognition, a map of where every photo was taken, and shared albums for the family. It’s called Immich. It’s free, it’s open source, and it runs nicely on a mini PC that fits behind your TV.

What Immich Actually Does

If you’ve used Google Photos, you already know how to use Immich. It looks and feels a lot like it.

Phone backup. Install the Immich app on iPhone or Android, point it at your server, and it uploads new photos and videos in the background.
Search that works. It recognizes faces and can search by what’s in the picture. Type ‘beach’ or ‘dog’ and it finds them. All of that processing happens on your own hardware.
Memories and a map. You get ‘on this day’ memories and a map view built from the location data already in your photos.
Accounts for everyone. Each person gets their own login, you can share albums, and partner sharing lets two people see each other’s libraries.

The big difference is where your photos live. They sit on a drive you own, in your house. No monthly bill, no storage tiers, and no surprise when a big company changes its pricing or its terms.

What You Need

A small computer. A used or budget mini PC with a recent Intel chip and 8GB of RAM or more is plenty for a family. Immich does its face and search processing on that machine, so a little extra power helps, but you don’t need anything fancy. Figure roughly $150 to $250.
Storage. Check how big your library is now and at least double it. A 2TB or 4TB drive covers most families for years.
Docker. Immich runs in Docker containers. If you’ve never touched Docker, this is a great first project. The Immich docs give you a ready-made compose file, and you mostly fill in where your photos should be stored.
A safe way to reach it from outside the house. More on this below, because it’s the part people get wrong.

The Basic Setup

I’m not going to paste a full tutorial here. The project moves fast and the official Immich docs stay current, so follow those for the exact commands. The flow looks like this:

Install Linux on the mini PC. Ubuntu Server or Debian are both fine.
Install Docker and Docker Compose.
Download the Immich compose file and example environment file from the official docs.
Set where uploads go (your big drive) and change the default database password before you start anything.
Start it up, open the web page from another computer on your network, and create the admin account.
Install the phone app, log in, and turn on backup.

Heads up: the first backup from a phone with years of photos takes a while. Leave the phone plugged in on Wi-Fi overnight and let it work.

Don’t Open It to the Whole Internet

Here’s where I get opinionated. You’ll want to see your photos when you’re away from home, and the tempting move is to forward a port on your router straight to the server. Don’t.

That puts your family’s entire photo library one bug away from anyone on the internet. Use a mesh VPN like Tailscale instead. Install it on the server and on your phones, and the Immich app connects through it from anywhere without opening a single port on your router. It’s free for personal use and takes about ten minutes to set up.

If someone really needs a public link to share an album with grandma, treat that as a separate project with its own security steps. Start private.

Your Server Is Not Your Backup

This is the part that matters most. Once Immich is your main photo library, that one drive is holding every picture of your kids. Drives die. Mini PCs get knocked off shelves. FPL does what FPL does.

The Immich team itself says it shouldn’t be the only place your photos live. So plan for that from day one:

Back up the photo folder to a second drive on a schedule.
Get a copy out of the house. An encrypted copy in cloud storage, or a drive at a relative’s place. A hurricane doesn’t care which closet the server is in.
Back up the database too. The photos are just files, but your albums, faces, and settings live in the database. Immich can save regular database dumps. Make sure those are part of your backup.
Test a restore. Pull a few photos back out of the backup and open them. A backup you’ve never restored from is a guess.

And don’t cancel Google Photos the day you install this. Run both side by side for a month or two until you trust the new setup.

What This Means for You

This is one of my favorite home lab projects because everyone in the house actually uses it, not just the person who built it. You pick up real Linux and Docker experience, and your family gets a photo app with no monthly bill.

The same pattern carries straight over to a small business. A box in the closet running a private service, reachable only over a VPN, with backups that leave the building. That setup works for a lot more than photos.

Got a spare mini PC and want to try this, or stuck halfway through the setup? Reach out. Always happy to troubleshoot.