You decided to leave Google Photos. Either iCloud’s $2.99 plan ran out of space, the AI-summary features finally crossed your threshold, or you just got tired of paying rent on your own family photos. The two self-hosted answers worth seriously trying in 2026 are Immich and PhotoPrism. Both are free, both have decent mobile apps, both index everything by face/place/object using on-server ML.
I ran both in parallel for two months on the same 90,000-photo / 12,000-video library. Here’s what’s actually different in 2026, and which one fits which person.
Storage layout — the most important difference
- Immich stores files in a flat
upload/+library/structure. Filenames are UUID-based; the original filename is preserved as metadata in the database. If you walked away from Immich tomorrow, your files would be in there but you’d need the database dump to make sense of them. - PhotoPrism stores files in your existing folder structure. You point it at
/photos/and it indexes whatever filenames and folders exist. Walk away from PhotoPrism, your library is intact and immediately usable.
This is the single biggest reason to pick one over the other. Immich is faster, has a slicker mobile app, and better search — but you’ve coupled to its database. PhotoPrism is slightly slower and the UI’s rougher, but your photos remain photos in folders, the way they were before. For a long-term archive of family memories, that’s a meaningful difference.
Search quality
Both use ML on the server side to index faces, places (via EXIF GPS), and object/scene labels. Quality differences:
- Faces. Immich is noticeably better. CLIP-style embeddings + a face-clustering pipeline that’s been tuned over the last year. On my 90k library it correctly identified 23 of 25 family members from a single training photo. PhotoPrism got 18.
- Free-text search. Immich supports natural-language search (“photos of dogs at the beach”) via CLIP — feels like Google Photos. PhotoPrism’s search is more keyword-tag based, less conversational.
- Places. Both work fine when EXIF GPS is present. Both fall back to “unknown location” gracefully. PhotoPrism has a nicer map UI; Immich has better timeline-by-place.
- Date / event clustering. Both auto-cluster trips and events. Immich is more aggressive (more clusters); PhotoPrism is more conservative. I prefer Immich’s behavior for travel photos, PhotoPrism’s for everyday shots.
Mobile-app upload reliability
This is the one that actually decides whether the system gets used. If photos don’t reliably upload from your phone, the whole thing fails because you stop trusting it.
- Immich’s iOS app: Excellent. Background upload reliably picks up new photos. Resumable uploads. Works on cellular if you allow it. Battery impact is reasonable.
- Immich’s Android app: Excellent. Same as iOS, plus a Wi-Fi-only toggle that actually works.
- PhotoPrism’s iOS app: Functional but dated. The official app exists but feels less polished. Background upload is finicky on iOS — Apple aggressively kills background tasks, and PhotoPrism’s app doesn’t keep up as gracefully as Immich’s.
- PhotoPrism’s Android app: Same — works, but PhotoSync (a paid third-party app) is what most PhotoPrism users actually use, configured to upload to a folder that PhotoPrism then indexes.
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