Immich Hosting: Photo and Video Backup on Your Own Server

Immich is an open-source (AGPL-3.0) photo and video platform: its phone apps upload your camera roll to your own server, and the web and mobile apps let you browse it by timeline, album, person or place. Choose it with a plan, pay, and we build the VPS (KVM, NVMe, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS) and install it in about six minutes after boot, most of it the first database setup. You get:

• Immich 3.3.5 with its PostgreSQL database and a Redis-compatible store, and the machine-learning service on plans with enough memory (see below).
• An HTTPS address like yourname-x7k2.devoster.app with a Let's Encrypt certificate, which the mobile apps connect to and share links use.
• Your admin account already created. You log in with your account email and a generated password shown in the Devoster dashboard, where you can also reset it. There is no public sign-up; you create accounts for others.
• Dashboard controls to open the app, restart, stop or start it, read its logs, run an update and connect your own domain.

The app is free; you pay only the VPS plan, with 10% off yearly. The server comes with full root, free nightly backups kept 3 days plus one snapshot, a dedicated IPv4, 1 Gbps with unlimited bandwidth and DDoS protection. Already have a Devoster VPS? You can install Immich on it from VPS Control, after the panel checks the OS, free ports 80/443 and disk, or reinstall the server with it, at no charge. Other apps that install this way are on the One-Click Apps page.

Install the Immich app from the App Store or Google Play, enter your server's HTTPS address, and log in. Then choose which albums on the phone to back up and turn backup on. From then on new photos and videos upload on their own, with options such as Wi-Fi only.

• The first upload is the long one. Years of photos can be tens of GB, and the speed is set by your phone's connection, not the server. Leave the app open on Wi-Fi and a charger the first night.
• Background backup works on both platforms, though phones, iPhones especially, decide when background apps may run. Opening the app now and then makes sure it catches up.
• From a computer: drag files onto the web app, or use Immich's command-line uploader for a large existing archive.

Immich backs up; it doesn't delete from your phone unless you ask it to. Check that a few months of photos are on the server before you free up space on the device.

Everything in Immich works on every plan: the timeline, albums and shared albums, sharing links, the map of where photos were taken, search by date, place, camera and other metadata, and video playback. The features that recognise what is in a photo come from a separate machine-learning service:

• Smart search: find photos by describing them, such as "beach at sunset" or "dog in snow".
• Face recognition: people are grouped automatically, and you name them once.
• Text search (OCR): find photos of receipts, signs or documents by the words in them.
• Duplicate detection: near-identical shots are found so you can keep the best one.

That service needs memory, so it runs automatically on plans with about 3.5 GB of RAM or more, which means Starter and up. On Micro it is switched off and these four features aren't available; if you upgrade later, it switches on. The first time it runs, it downloads its models (about 2.1 GB) from Hugging Face, then works through your library in the background, which can take a while for a large one.

Two things decide the plan: whether you want the machine-learning features, and how much disk your library takes. Immich keeps your originals plus thumbnails and video previews, and the app, database and models need room too.

Check the size of your current photo library before choosing. Video fills disk fastest: a minute of 4K from a phone is commonly a few hundred MB. Bigger libraries need bigger plans, up to 200 GB on Mega; you can upgrade from the panel later, but plans are not shrunk in place.

• Accounts for your family. As admin you create users in Immich's administration page; each person gets a private library and backs up their own phone. Optional storage quotas keep one person from filling the disk.
• Sharing. Share albums with other users on your server, or create a link (optionally with a password and expiry) for people without an account.
• No email. Outbound mail ports are blocked by default on Devoster VPS plans, so Immich's email notifications don't send. Tell people about new accounts and shares yourself.
• Password resets for the admin are done from the Devoster dashboard. A reset signs out every session, including the mobile apps, so log in again on your phone afterwards; backup resumes once you do.

Your photos deserve more than one copy. Nightly backups (kept 3 days) and your snapshot slot cover the whole VPS, but for photos you can't take again, keep a second copy somewhere else too: copy the library folder, /opt/devoster/data/immich-library, off the server over SFTP or with rsync on a schedule, or keep the originals on a computer or drive as well.

Updates: we check new Immich versions and apply them in a maintenance hour you choose, or when you press Update now. A snapshot of the VPS is taken first, and if Immich doesn't come back healthy the server is rolled back automatically. Keep the mobile app updated too, since it expects a matching server version.

The server is unmanaged: you have full root, and its security and your library are your responsibility. Our VPS hardening checklist is worth an hour on a server holding family photos. And if your photos must stay outside the US, note the servers are in Utah.