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Google Photos is arguably the stickiest product Google makes: every phone photo, automatically organized, searchable by face and place. Immich is the open-source project that finally made leaving it plausible, cloning the pipeline - phone, backup, timeline, search - onto hardware you control.
The question is no longer whether a self-hosted replacement exists. It is whether the trade - subscription and data mining out, VPS and responsibility in - makes sense for you.
TL;DR: Which One Should You Pick?
Stay on Google Photos if you want zero maintenance, the absolute best AI search and editing, and your library is small enough that the subscription stays cheap.
Move to Immich if you want originals at full quality, your photos out of advertising infrastructure, one flat server bill for the whole family, and you can commit to running backups.
Immich vs Google Photos at a Glance
| Immich (self-hosted) | Google Photos | |
|---|---|---|
| Mobile auto-backup | Yes, iOS + Android | Yes |
| Original quality | Always, no recompression | Plan-dependent |
| Face / object search | Yes, local ML | Yes, best in class |
| Shared family library | Yes, partner accounts | Yes |
| Cost model | Flat VPS price, unlimited users | Per account storage tiers |
| Privacy | Photos never leave your server | Scanned by provider systems |
| Maintenance | Updates + backups are on you | None |
| Longevity risk | You control it | Product/policy changes |
Where Google Photos Wins
Effortlessness at global scale. The AI search remains a step ahead, the editing tools are excellent, sharing works with everyone instantly, and the reliability engineering behind it is invisible and world-class. For a casual photographer inside the free tier or the small paid tiers, it is honestly a great product - the pain arrives with growing libraries, multiple family members paying separately, and the quiet unease about what an advertising company learns from your camera roll.
Where Immich Wins
Ownership economics and principles. One server serves unlimited family accounts at a flat price, originals stay originals forever, and the ML that recognizes your kids runs on your CPU, not in an ad-profile pipeline. EU hosting keeps the entire archive under GDPR jurisdiction. And the project cannot be discontinued out from under you - a real consideration given the graveyard of retired Google products.
The costs are real too: you are now the SRE. Updates land frequently (read the release notes - the project moves fast), storage fills up, and backups are your responsibility. Our best VPS for Immich guide covers sizing; the short version is 4 GB RAM minimum, 8 GB comfortable, NVMe storage sized at your library plus growth.
What the Switch Costs
| Item | Immich on VPS | Google Photos |
|---|---|---|
| Server (200 GB NVMe, family) | ~6-9 EUR/mo flat | - |
| Storage tiers | Upgrade disk/volume as needed | Per-account subscription |
| Off-site backup | Object storage, a few EUR/mo | Included |
| Your time | Setup weekend + occasional updates | Zero |
Contabo from 5.99 EUR per month offers the most storage per euro and is the budget pick for large libraries. Hetzner from 5.49 EUR pairs fast NVMe with cheap expansion volumes - our overall recommendation - and DigitalOcean from 6 USD gives US families lower upload latency plus dead-simple snapshots. Full provider details in our VPS comparison.
Verdict
This is the rare comparison where “it depends” has a crisp boundary: it depends on whether you will actually maintain backups. If yes, Immich delivers ninety-plus percent of the Google Photos experience with none of the surveillance and a bill that stops scaling with your family size. If no - and be honest - your memories are safer inside Google than on an unmaintained server.
A sane migration: run Immich alongside Google Photos for a month with auto-upload to both, verify your backup restore works, then let the subscription lapse. The r/selfhosted migration threads are full of people who did exactly that and never looked back.
Frequently asked questions
Does Immich really match the Google Photos experience?
Closer than any other self-hosted app, by design. Background auto-upload from iOS and Android, a familiar timeline, shared albums, face grouping, and natural-language search all work. What you give up is Google's absolute best-in-class AI search, its editing suite, and the guarantee that someone else worries about uptime. For most families the daily experience is genuinely equivalent.
What does self-hosting photos on a VPS cost compared to Google One?
A 200 GB NVMe VPS runs around 6 to 9 EUR per month flat, serving your whole family - Contabo and Hetzner are typical picks. Google One's comparable tiers are cheaper per gigabyte at small sizes, so pure price is not the argument below roughly 2 TB. The self-hosting case is originals kept at full quality, no per-account fees, EU data residency, and immunity to product shutdowns and policy changes.
What happens to my photos if my VPS dies?
Whatever your backup strategy says - that is the honest answer and the real cost of leaving Google. A responsible Immich setup pairs the VPS with automated off-site backups, for example nightly Restic or Borg snapshots of the library and database to object storage. Test a restore once before migrating your library. Provider snapshots add a second safety net for the whole server.