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Finding a private self hosted Google Photos alternative that doesn’t profit from my photos
(alternativeto.net)
this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2025
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Tl;dr:
I have experience with both Ente and Immich and I can say they are both excellent. I like Ente a little bit more, but Immich is imho better for selfhosting (both are easy to self host). What I like about Immich in that regard is that it keeps photos organized as files too, they can be categorized in folders (like year > month > day and its customizable). I just want to have an option to have access to the files directly on the filesystem and if (big if) Immich dies, I still have my photos accessible and organized in directories without me needing to do anything. Ente uses s3 storage system.
I haven't used immich in a while, but ente felt like the more mature product when I was evaluating the two.
It feels quite equal now that immich is stable. I was actually waiting for that, because I knew the updates before the stable release were sometimes painful and I didn't want to do that on my production env. 😀
Immich's AI search is so much better than PhotoPrism
It’s true. I uploaded a nude out of curiosity. I then searched “Penis”. It found my penis. Now if only my wife could too. 10/10 Immich best self hosted google photos replacement.
Lol
It's even better than Google's in some regards.
Apart from me maybe thinking immich should have built in backup tools, I’ve very much found it met my needs.
Personally I host all this kind of stuff using containers, only mounting the folders that need backing up. Then I just back up all my podman volumes. It's pretty nice not depending on any tools that have to be maintained or anything like that.