I’ve decided to give an alternative to Apple Photos a try. Photos has been increasingly  frustrating in its organization on the iphone and its pretty darn slow on my desktop if I try and offload the data base to an external drive.

Immich

An open source, self hosted photo solution, Immich is also free. And it has an iPhone app that will sync with you camera roll to automatically backup photos from the camera.

 

I will flush out the documentation but basically I followed baty.net/posts/2025/12/from-apple-photos-to-immich/ 

Immich is a Docker container but My Pi’s aren’t robust enough (I think) so I installed it on my Intel Mac Mini (2019) which is doing duty as my Calibre server and Jellyfin server. This means I have to use the clucnky Docker Desktop for Mac but c’est la vie. It install via docker -compose file docs.immich.app/install/docker-compose. The wget didn’t work so I just downloaded the file from Github. I had to use terminal to rename the .env file. Then I fired up the container by running the compose file and that was pretty much it.

Visit the app by going to 192.168.1.x:2283, create an account and add a password.

Preliminary testing

cd into your directory and docker compose up -d

I played around with and the iPhone app and decided it was going to work and proceeded to move my main library of 30,000+ images. What I did was copy the photos library (Photos Library.photoslibrary) over to the mac mini (150gig, 1+ hours) then use an utility to export it. In retrospect that was silly since I exported it to an external SSD for temporary storage anyway. What I should have done was  run the utility direct from the original library to the ssd and save me a lot of time.

osxphotos

To install:

brew tap Rhetbull/osxphotos

brew install osxphotos

It’s a pretty fancy little utility but I went with the basics:

osxphotos export /Volumes/External_SSD/DestinationFolder \
--skip-original-if-edited \
--sidecar XMP \
--touch-file \
--directory "{folder_album}" \
--download-missing \
--library '/Users/admin/Desktop/photo library/Photos Library.photoslibrary'

Note this if you want to import a library other than the defualt Photos library. Otherwise you can just eliminate the last line.

It didn’t take too long and it had exported all my images in a fancy folder structure on the ssd.

immich cli

Then I had to install the command line interface for immich. I discovered it was on brew which was easier than the suggested npm.

brew install immich-cli

Then you need to go to the immich web interface (192.168.1.x:2283) and add an api key. Account Settings > Api Key.  Then add the key tot eh following and log in.

immich login http://192.168.1.x:2283/api APIKEYxxxXXXxxxXXXXxxXXXXXx

Once you are logged in, let ’er rip.

immich upload --recursive /Volumes/External_SSD/DestinationFolder --album

Less than an hour later the images were imported. It took a couple of hours for the thumbnails to appear and overnight for things like geo-location and face recognition to  finishing running.

Conclusion

So far it is pretty slick. I can  take a picture on my phone and  it is set to upload the image as soon as I open the app (if I am at home). The response is snappy, the AI assisted search is wonderful (for finding images with two cats, or bread, or pizza etc.)

If I keep it I will likely set up a domain and a ssl cert so I can access the images from outside my firewall. But for now the big downside is that if I want to do anything but look at an image on my iPhone from outside my personal network I am out of luck—the app only stores thumbnails. And maybe a followup review where I can add a bit more detail…