How to self-host your Google Photos alternative
Self-hosting your photo library splits the problem into two different moments: capture, with your phone backing up on its own with no intervention from you, or the library you already have, organizing and making it searchable without anything touching it. The catalog's 2 alternatives address each moment separately — they aren't the same tool under a different name.
Tools that meet this intent
Alternative to Google Photos
AI-powered photo and video backup, a self-hosted alternative to Google Photos.
Alternative to Google Photos
AI-tagged photo manager, an alternative to Google Photos.
Real server requirements
Between 512MB and 2GB of RAM depending on the tool — never a single number.
Immich is centered on automatic backup: its mobile apps upload photos and videos to your server as soon as you take them, with facial recognition and object search to find them later. Per its own notes, it supports optional hardware acceleration for both video transcoding and facial recognition — neither is required, both are enabled separately if you have a GPU available. PhotoPrism is centered on organizing a library you already have: it auto-tags via AI and supports semantic search, but — as the catalog documents — it never modifies or moves the original files.
PhotoPrism's license is worth being precise about: the catalog classifies it as "Source-available (non-OSI)" — the code is visible, but the license itself isn't OSI-approved as open source. That's a different category from Immich, which is fully FOSS (AGPL-3.0).
What you gain and lose versus the SaaS
Being FOSS isn't a guarantee of privacy or security — it's a property of the code's license, not a measure of how well it protects your photos. If what you need is your phone backing up automatically without thinking about it, Immich addresses that directly. If you already have a photo library and just want to organize it without anything touching it, PhotoPrism covers that case — with the caveat of its source-available license.