Immich on Your NAS: The Self-Hosted Google Photos Guide
· Last verified July 2026
Google Photos quietly became the place most people keep their entire visual life, and then just as quietly started charging for the storage and feeding the pictures into features nobody asked for. Immich is the reason a growing number of people are moving that library back onto their own NAS, because it finally matches the two things that made Google Photos sticky (background upload from your phone and search that actually finds faces and objects) without the subscription or the data mining. This guide walks through what Immich is, how much disk a real photo and video library needs, what hardware the machine learning wants, how to deploy it on the common NAS platforms, and the backup step that people skip at their peril.
What Immich is, and why people leave Google Photos
Immich is a self-hosted photo and video manager: you install it on your NAS, point the iOS or Android app at it, and from then on every picture and clip you shoot uploads in the background exactly the way Google Photos does. The project homepage and the GitHub repository are the honest source of truth for what it can do today, and the short version is that the feature gap with Google Photos has closed to the point where most families stop noticing the difference within a week.
The pull factors are the usual ones: you stop paying a monthly storage bill, your photos live on a disk you can hold in your hand, and nothing gets scanned to train someone else's model. The push factor is that Immich's machine learning runs locally, so the face grouping and the "show me photos of the beach" search happen on your own CPU rather than in a data centre, which many people find reassuring for what is often the most personal data they own. If you are weighing it against the alternatives, our NAS for photographers guide puts Immich, Photoprism and Synology Photos side by side.
One thing to be clear-eyed about before you commit a family archive: Immich moves fast, and its own documentation flags that the project is under very active development and that updates can occasionally include breaking changes. That is not a reason to avoid it, but it is the reason the backup section below is non-negotiable rather than optional.
How much storage a photo and video library actually eats
The single biggest planning mistake is sizing storage for the library you have today rather than the one you will have in three years, because unlike a music collection a phone-fed photo library only ever grows. Immich keeps your original files untouched and adds small generated thumbnails on top, so a good rule of thumb is to budget your current library size multiplied by roughly 1.1 to 1.2 and then plan for steady growth from there.
The raw numbers make the growth obvious once you do the arithmetic. A modern phone photo lands around 3-6 MB, so ten thousand pictures is already 30-60 GB; the real weight comes from video, because 4K footage runs roughly 300-400 MB per minute, which means a single ten-minute clip can outweigh a hundred stills. A family that films a few minutes of the kids most days can add several hundred gigabytes a year without ever feeling like they are hoarding, which is why an active household library routinely climbs past a couple of terabytes within a few years.
That trajectory is exactly why a four-bay NAS with 8 TB or larger CMR drives has become the default recommendation: it gives you room to grow without an early chassis migration. If you want to pressure-test your own numbers, our NAS storage planning guide walks through raw-versus-usable capacity, and the drive database lets you compare capacities and street prices before you buy. The concrete takeaway is to buy at least double the disk you think you need today, because migrating a full pool into a bigger box two years from now costs far more time than the extra drive costs money.
The hardware reality: CPU, RAM and the GPU question
Immich has two very different appetites. Serving the library (browsing, viewing, and streaming a clip to the app) is light and runs comfortably on almost any NAS, but the machine-learning jobs that grope through every photo to detect faces and objects are genuinely CPU- and RAM-hungry, especially during the first bulk scan of an existing library. The official requirements page is the number to trust here, and in practice that means an Intel x86 NAS with a minimum of a few gigabytes free for Immich and headroom on top for the rest of your apps.
The GPU question is where people over-spend. Immich's face and object recognition runs on the CPU by default, and for a home-sized library that is perfectly adequate; the machine simply takes longer to work through the backlog the first time. A GPU only earns its keep in two situations, both documented on the project's hardware-accelerated ML and hardware transcoding pages: shortening that initial multi-hour scan, and transcoding video for smooth playback on the go. An Intel iGPU with Quick Sync, the kind built into the processors in most modern Intel NAS boxes, covers the transcoding case without adding a discrete card at all.
So the sensible order of priorities is capacity first, then RAM, then a modern Intel iGPU, and only then a discrete GPU if you are impatient about the first scan. A four-bay Intel NAS with 8 GB of RAM (16 GB if you also run Plex, Nextcloud or other containers) is the pragmatic sweet spot for almost every household, and it leaves the door open to everything in our self-hosting on NAS guide rather than dedicating the box to photos alone.
Deploying Immich: Docker Compose on every major platform
Immich ships as a set of Docker containers rather than a one-click app, which sounds intimidating but is genuinely the same short recipe on every platform. Docker Compose is a small tool that reads a single text file describing which containers to run and starts them together; the Docker Compose docs explain the concept in a paragraph, and Immich's official Compose guide gives you the exact file to paste in. You download two files, set a couple of values like where the photos should live and a database password, and bring the stack up; the whole thing is a fifteen-minute job the first time.
Where the platforms differ is only the wrapper around that same Compose file, so pick the path that matches your NAS:
- TrueNAS SCALE and Unraid have community-maintained deployments that Immich documents directly, on its TrueNAS and Unraid pages, the closest thing to a one-click install for either OS.
- Synology exposes Docker as Container Manager, where you create a project from the Compose file above; a Synology DS425+ or DS925+ with an Intel chip and enough RAM is a comfortable host.
- Ugreen, QNAP and anything else with Docker can run the stack through Portainer, a friendly web UI for Docker that lets you paste the Compose file and hit deploy without touching a terminal.
Whichever wrapper you use, the containers underneath are identical, which is why the Immich community can support every platform from one set of docs. If you are still choosing an operating system for the box, the NAS operating-system hub compares Synology DSM, Unraid, TrueNAS SCALE and the rest with Docker support in mind. The takeaway: don't let "it uses Docker" scare you off; on TrueNAS, Unraid or via Portainer it is a paste-and-deploy job, not a Linux course.
Immich is not a backup, and neither is your RAID
This is the section that saves family archives, so read it even if you skim the rest. Immich replaces Google Photos as a library, meaning it is the live, working copy of your photos, and a live copy is exactly the thing a backup is supposed to protect you against losing. If you delete an album by accident, get hit by ransomware, or the NAS is stolen or burns, a single Immich instance takes the only copy of those memories with it.
The trap that catches technical people is assuming RAID covers this. It does not: RAID keeps the array online when a drive dies, but it faithfully replicates every deletion and every corruption to all the disks at once, which is why RAID is not a backup is the most important sentence on this whole site. You need a genuinely separate copy, following the 3-2-1 backup strategy: two of those copies can live on-site, but at least one has to be off-site and disconnected.
For Immich specifically, a complete backup means two things captured together: the folder that holds your uploaded originals, and the PostgreSQL database that stores the albums, faces and search metadata. Immich's backup and restore documentation spells out how to dump the database and which folders matter; miss the database and you keep the pictures but lose every album and every tag you built. The concrete rule is simple: back up the upload folder and a database dump on the same schedule, keep one copy off-site, and test a restore before you ever need it.
One advanced tip, for the technical crowd
If you already have a large photo archive sitting in tidy folders on the NAS, you probably do not want Immich to copy all of it into its own upload area and double your disk usage. Immich's external libraries feature is built exactly for this: it reads an existing folder tree in place, indexing and thumbnailing the photos without moving or duplicating the originals, so your decade of Lightroom exports stays where it is while still appearing in the app with faces and search. It is a bonus, not a requirement (a fresh install with normal uploads is simpler), but for anyone migrating an established archive it is the difference between a clean cut-over and a needless second copy.
Recommended hardware for an Immich NAS
Recommendation
For a first Immich build, pick a four-bay Intel NAS with 8 GB of RAM (a Ugreen DXP4800 Plus, Synology DS425+ or QNAP TS-464 all handle the machine learning and leave room for other containers) and fill two or three bays with 8 TB CMR drives in SHR-1 or RAID 5 for a growing library with single-drive protection. Skip the discrete GPU unless the first bulk scan's speed genuinely bothers you; the built-in Intel Quick Sync engine already covers video transcoding. Above all, set up the backup on day one: a copy of the upload folder plus a PostgreSQL dump, following 3-2-1 with at least one off-site copy, so that the day you move off Google Photos is the day your memories get safer, not more fragile.
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