Self-hosted photo libraries in 2026: revisit Immich, PhotoPrism and Ente before you upload another album to Google Photos

Photos look like a personal topic, but in many small Indian businesses they are working data. A studio keeps client shoots. A construction firm keeps site progress pictures. A school keeps event photos with children’s faces in them. Most of this sits in a mix of phone galleries, a Google Photos account tied to the owner’s personal Gmail, and a pen drive in a drawer. When storage runs out, someone pays for a bigger plan or deletes old folders without asking anyone.

Self-hosted photo libraries offer another path. They back up phones automatically, index pictures by date, place, face and content, and keep the files on storage you control. In 2026 three open source projects deserve a calm look: Immich, the fast growing Google Photos style project; PhotoPrism, the older Go based library with a strong browsing and indexing focus; and Ente, an end-to-end encrypted photo service whose full server and apps are open source and can be self-hosted.

This is not a race to pick a winner. The revisit habit here is simple: learn what each tool really is, unlearn the idea that “backup” and “photo app” mean the same thing, re-learn how media storage behaves at scale, practise a restore, and only then apply it to real albums.

A scenario to keep us honest

This is an invented scenario, not a real company. Kolhapur Frames Studio is a six person wedding and event photography team. They shoot around 40 events a year. Each event produces RAW files, edited JPEGs and short video clips. Today the edited output goes into a paid cloud photo account owned by the founder, and clients receive shared album links. The founder wants three things:

• A searchable archive of all delivered work, by client and date
• Phone backup for the team without personal accounts mixing with studio work
• Clear control over who can see client photos, because those are personal data of the families

We will come back to this studio at the end.

Where these tools came from

Immich

Immich was started in 2022 by Alex Tran as a self-hosted replacement for Google Photos, focused first on mobile backup. The GitHub repository was created in February 2022 and grew very fast; at the time of writing it has well over a hundred thousand stars, which makes it one of the most watched self-hosted projects. In 2024 the core team joined FUTO, an organisation that funds open source software, so the main developers now work on it full time. The project long carried a warning not to use it as the only copy of your photos. It reached its first stable major release in 2025, and the current line is v3, with v3.3.5 released on 21 October 2026 and a v3.4.0 release candidate on 30 October 2026.

PhotoPrism

PhotoPrism is older. The repository dates from January 2018. It was built in Go by a small team based in Germany, with a focus on indexing large existing collections, browsing by place and time, and running on modest hardware. It is self-funded through memberships. Releases use a date based tag style, for example a build from 29 October 2026, rather than semantic versions.

Ente

Ente began as a paid, end-to-end encrypted photo backup service, a privacy focused alternative to Apple and Google Photos. The company later opened the server code, so the monorepo now holds the mobile, web and desktop clients plus the server, which the project calls Museum. Ente also builds Ente Auth, a two factor authenticator, and Ente Locker for documents. Ente states that its code and cryptography have been externally audited by Cure53, Symbolic Software and Fallible, an Indian penetration testing firm.

Licences, in plain words

Immich

Immich is released under the AGPL-3.0. You can run it, change it and use it in a business. If you modify it and offer it to users over a network, you must make your changes available to those users. For an internal studio archive, this rarely matters in practice.

PhotoPrism

The PhotoPrism Community Edition is under the AGPL-3.0 as well. Some features are reserved for paying members in the Plus and higher tiers, for example interactive world maps, and there are separate commercial editions for teams. Read the current feature list before you plan around a specific capability, because the line between free and paid features has moved over the years.

Ente

Ente’s clients and server are under the AGPL-3.0. The hosted service is paid beyond a free 10 GB, but self-hosting is allowed and documented. The important difference is not the licence, it is the design: Ente encrypts on the device, so the server stores data it cannot read.

How each is built

Immich

Immich is a TypeScript server with PostgreSQL for metadata, Redis compatible storage for job queues, a separate machine learning container for face recognition and smart search, and native mobile apps. It is usually run with Docker Compose. Expect several containers, not one binary.

PhotoPrism

PhotoPrism is a Go application with a web front end and an embedded machine learning model for classification and face detection. It works with MariaDB for larger libraries, or SQLite for small ones. It is usually run in Docker. It has no dedicated mobile backup app of its own; people commonly sync phones to a folder with a separate tool and let PhotoPrism index that folder, or use WebDAV.

Ente

Ente’s server, Museum, is written in Go. It uses PostgreSQL for metadata and S3 compatible object storage for encrypted files, so a self-host needs an object store such as a cloud bucket or a self-hosted S3 compatible server. Machine learning, such as face detection and semantic search, runs on the client device, because the server never sees plain images.

Features that matter for a small team

Immich

• Automatic background backup from Android and iOS apps
• Face recognition, smart search by description, map view and timeline
• Shared albums, partner sharing and multiple users
• External libraries, so it can index an existing folder without importing it
• Very active development, which brings new features and also frequent release notes to read

PhotoPrism

• Strong indexing of existing folders, including RAW files and video
• Browsing by places, labels, colours, moments and calendar
• Read only mode for an archive you do not want the app to change
• Good fit when the files already live on a NAS and you want a viewer and search on top
• Mobile backup is not its core job

Ente

• End-to-end encryption by default, including shared albums
• Mobile, desktop and web apps with background upload
• Face detection and semantic search on device
• Easy export of originals, which matters for leaving later
• Self-hosting needs more parts to be set up correctly, including object storage and client configuration to point at your server

Performance, carefully

There is no neutral, current benchmark that compares these three on the same hardware and the same library, so we will not invent one. A few honest observations from how they are designed:

• Immich and PhotoPrism do machine learning on the server. The first index of a large library can take hours or days on a small machine, and CPU, RAM and an optional GPU make a big difference.
• Ente moves that work to each phone or laptop. The server stays light, but each device does its own indexing and battery use is part of the cost.
• Thumbnails and transcoded video can add a meaningful share on top of the original size. Plan disk with headroom.

If you need numbers, run your own test with a copy of one real year of photos, and note the hardware, the version and the time taken.

Operations

Installation

All three are commonly deployed with Docker Compose. Immich and PhotoPrism can run on one small server or NAS with local disk. Ente needs PostgreSQL plus an S3 compatible store, and the apps must be told to use your server instead of the hosted one.

Upgrades

Immich moves fast and has had breaking changes between major lines. Read release notes every time, pin versions in Compose, and never use a “latest” tag on a production archive. PhotoPrism releases less often and its upgrades are usually quieter. Ente server upgrades follow the monorepo; track the server changelog, not only app store updates.

Monitoring

At minimum, watch disk space, container health and the background job queue. A photo server that has silently stopped processing uploads looks fine from the outside until someone searches for last month’s event.

Backups

The unlearning point: a photo app is not a backup. If Immich, PhotoPrism or Ente is the only place your photos live, you have one copy with a nice interface. Follow the 3-2-1 idea that Immich’s own documentation points to: three copies, on two kinds of media, with one off site.

• Back up the original files and the database together, at the same point in time
• For Immich and PhotoPrism, dump the database with the documented method, not by copying live database files
• For Ente, back up the PostgreSQL database and the object store; remember that without the users’ keys, the encrypted files cannot be read, so key recovery is part of the plan
• Restore to a separate machine at least once a quarter and open a random album

Security

Exposure

Do not put an admin panel directly on the internet without thought. Use a reverse proxy with TLS, keep the server patched, and consider a mesh VPN for staff access while keeping only client share links public.

Accounts and access

Give each staff member a separate account. Remove access the day someone leaves. Keep the admin account separate from daily use.

Data on the server

With Immich and PhotoPrism, anyone with server access can see the photos. With Ente, the server holds encrypted data, which reduces the impact of a stolen disk or a curious admin. That is a real architectural difference, not a marketing point.

The Indian context: the DPDP Act

Under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, photographs of identifiable people are personal data. A studio or school acts as a data fiduciary for those images. In practice this means: collect consent for the purpose, keep photos only as long as needed, protect them with reasonable security safeguards, and be able to delete them when asked. Self-hosting gives control, but it also puts the responsibility squarely on you. Take legal advice for your own case; this section is general awareness, not legal guidance.

When not to adopt each

Do not choose Immich if

• You cannot spare time to read release notes and plan upgrades
• Your server has very little RAM and you want server side machine learning

Do not choose PhotoPrism if

• Phone backup for many users is your main need
• You need a feature that sits only in a paid tier and you do not want to pay

Do not choose Ente self-hosted if

• Nobody on the team is comfortable running PostgreSQL and object storage
• You need the server to search or process images centrally

Do not self-host at all if

• There is no one who owns backups and restores
• A paid, well managed service with a proper business account meets your needs and budget

Back to Kolhapur Frames Studio

For this invented studio, a sensible path is to pilot Immich on a small server with an external library pointing at the delivered work folders, one account per staff member, and shared albums for clients. Pin the version, keep a nightly database dump and a weekly off site copy of the originals, and test one restore before moving the first season of work. If the founder later decides that end-to-end encryption of client photos is worth extra operational effort, run a short Ente self-host trial with a separate bucket. PhotoPrism stays a good option if they mostly want to browse the existing NAS archive and are happy to handle phone backup separately.

Revisit checklist

• Write down what you need: phone backup, archive browsing, or private sharing
• Check the licence and which features are free or paid
• Size disk for originals plus thumbnails and video with headroom
• Pin versions and read release notes before every upgrade
• Back up files and database together, and keep one copy off site
• Practise a restore on another machine
• Separate staff accounts and remove leavers quickly
• Map your photo handling to DPDP consent, retention and deletion

Sources

• Immich repository and README: https://github.com/immich-app/immich
• Immich documentation: https://immich.app/docs
• PhotoPrism repository and README: https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism
• PhotoPrism documentation and licence: https://docs.photoprism.app/
• Ente monorepo and README: https://github.com/ente-io/ente
• Ente self-hosting documentation: https://ente.io/help/self-hosting/
• Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023: https://www.meity.gov.in/