Self hosted immich
this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2026
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Privacy
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There's also hosted and encrypted Ente at ente.io.
You can also self host ente.
True but if you're gonna do that, might as well use Immich.
When I switched immich had incompatible changes every time I opened the app on my phone. I hear it's gotten a lot better about that.
I'm using immich as a daily driver for a year and some change now. The only breaking update was from beta to stable.
Immich is fantastic!
Yeah... i need to invest in that
While I do recommend this, it doesn't answer OP's question of preventing images from going to iCloud
The obvious answer is "stop using iCloud and use Immich instead".
My take is that OP is asking how to disable iCloud, not for alternatives to it
Uhh... Yeah it does. Don't use iCloud. Host your own Immich server and move on with your life
Nextcloud or immich
Upload your photo backups to your own server. You can also use a app like FolderSync to just upload your photos from your phone to your PC or a home NAS.
I have been slowly getting rid of my dependency on cloud services, things like contacts and calendar are a good way to slowly start.
Yeah i guess i should really invest in a NAS. Not sure where to start tho
This really depends on your comfort levels TBH. My first NAS was a old motherboard with about 4gb of memory and a old core 2 duo cpu.
If you have any old components such as a old laptop, or a old pc, or maybe some thing like a raspberry pi you can start tinkering with Samba shares.
With a raspberry pi you could run something like HomeAssistant and setup a small smaba share. Plug a hardrive in and you have a network share to store files.
As for older pc components you can start with something like truenas, it's a little bit of a learning curve but it's a good way to tinker and slowly start to learn.
For me I run truenas for all my home NAS and media storage. On the side, another pc runs something called Unraid for services like Nextcloud and Immich to keep things separated.
Eithe check out https://ente.com/ which is e2e encrypted, open source cloud photo storage with many nice features or look into self-hosting it or Immich.
You can go through iCloud settings and delete all backups then sign out of iCloud.
You probably know this. And, you might suspect as I do that nothing is ever really deleted, they just disable your access to it and don't do anymore backups. There's nothing we can do about that, we gave it to them, they'll keep it forever, associated with your account, no matter what they say--at least that's what I think. Maybe Apple really does delete it, but I doubt it.
Google doesn't delete anything, I doubt Apple does, either:
Settings -> your name -> icloud -> saved to icloud -> photos “off”.
Turn on advanced data protection.
Back up your photos first.
I also do not store photos on icloud so I understand that a person might want that.
Why do you want that?
I was looking into Ente but a lot of people were concerned about them being an Indian company and some other things that didn't sound great that I can't remember anymore.
I ended up using immich. I'm relatively happy with it. My camera app refuses to recognize it as a gallery though. But, im switching to graphene shortly so I'll figure that out later
What's wrong with the app being indian?
I didn't say anything was wrong, I said other people had concerns. Seemed to be around their privacy laws.
Shit government and laws
Ente is open source so if self-hosted, it's less of a concern where the company is from
Also it's e2ee, so unless the client is shady, it should be fine as hosted too
Have you got a Mac too? You can just sync your photos to that and store them locally, then sync them back across to your devices. That's what I do, no cloud storage involved and you get more control over which devices have which photos
I don't, the only one i had is now running Alpine Linux lol
As a heads up for everyone recommending Immich: for the last little while, it's been owned by FUTO, a company that has apparently ties to both Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin.
FUTO's association with controversial political figures, particularly Curtis Yarvin, has become a flashpoint in the discussion. Yarvin's self-described fascist views and his platforming on FUTO channels have led many in the community to question the organization's values and intentions.
No shade if anyone wants to use it anyway, but just mentioning it as it may be a privacy concern/could potentially become one in the future.
Apple positions iCloud as a “must use” — but I still use my phone with syncs and backups going to my computer. No iCloud. All photos get transferred to the computer on each sync, where they get sorted and touched up without the Photos app, and then a curated folder with stripped metadata etc. gets synched back to the phone.
Direct icloud alternative would be proton. Think the unlimited plan gives you like 500GB so that's how I backup my photos. It autosyncs to proton drive and they use e2ee
I don't use the cloud for files in general, only issue for me is my pictures
Yeah, the proton drive has auto syncing with your photo library if you set it up that way. So if you want exactly like icloud, that's one way you can go about it
Immich for sure. Which a bunch of people have already suggested.
That said, make sure you also invest the time and energy into a proper 3-2-1 backup strategy:
- 3 copies: your primary pool of data (Immich library) and at least two backup copies
- 2 different media types: SSD/NVMe as well as HDD NAS (as an example)
- 1 copy off-site: cloud backup and/or another server located at a friend's house
How I do it:
- Immich lives on my Unraid server which is 3x14TB spinning HDDs (two arrray disks and one parity)
- NIghtly backup to another small server in same physical area as Unraid server but using NVMe storage
- Nightly backup to yet another small server with NVMe storage at a family members house
- Nightly backup to Backblaze B2 storage
Sounds like a lot but was affordable (not so much anymore because of AI driving the cost of PC parts through the roof. Both of the "other" servers are cheap PCs. One is a Raspberry Pi 4 running on a 2.5" SSD rather than microSD. The other is an old Lenovo Thinkcentre micro PC that I paid $60 for at a computer recycling place.
B2 storage is pretty affordable. I pay around $5/mo for just my photos/videos. It's less than 1TB currently. There are heaps of other cloud storage options. B2 just seemed to fit well for me. Worth noting that up until recently, you had to either encrypt the data yourself before sending to Backblaze or have them do it for you, but that meant they had the encryption keys. They just implemented always on encryption though. But again, they have the keys. So I encrypt it before sending it off.
Long winded explanation. But early in my family's digital picture journey I had a close call and thought I lost wedding, honeymoon, and early baby pics due to a computer crash. Since then I've been more cautious and thoughtful.
Syncthing + any floss gallery app, this is the easyest way since you don't even need a server, just your phone and a PC to automatically sync from time to time
I haven't tried it in forever but last time I tried syncthing on android I just couldn't figure out how to make it work.
I suggest you BasicSync, it's lightweight and it let you use the web configurator
Thank you, I'll check it out.
I have three drives of 1TB on which I replicate my entire collection.
I finally bit the bullet and deployed image this past weekend, it took a few tries and I would suggest to start simple with your first one, you don't need a complex raid system to just test out copying your photos into it.
As others have mentioned, if you are truly self hosting image you will have multiple copies of your photos and other locations as well, anyways.
But once you actually get the settings dialed in I was shocked at how effective the facial recognition and tagging was, and even more shocked at just how much the whole interface looked like Google photos. Like, the whole design language is shared across both of their uis as best I can tell.
And Google photos is what I had moved off of back in the start of this year, so it felt like coming home for me.
Also worth mention just because folks don't always think about it at the start, for anyone that has an interest in keeping all of SFW and NSFW content completely separated, I just loaded a second instance of Immich pointing to a different port, in my Portainer deployment, and have two fully functional collections on the same box.
Hetzner + Nextcloud or „Ente.io“