Immich

The App that inspired my journey. Started in 2022 as a solo Reddit side project by Alex Tran, it's blown up — north of 100,000 GitHub stars, a release shipping basically every week, and a mobile app that genuinely doesn't feel like a hobby project. The team got picked up by FUTO in 2024, an it's probably the closest the FOSS world has ever come to actually replacing a polished consumer product.

What I actually use it for

My entire personal photo and video library. Immich does exactly what it says and it's one of the most useful and impactful things to self host if you value your photos and videos. First and foremost, it's all private. Secondly, (at least until recently) physical storage is much more plentiful and cheaper than its cloud counterpart, and it's buy once not every month. The fully polished app auto-syncs from your phone allowing for essentially unlimited phone storage and automatic backups.

What surprised me

I guess surprise is a stretch here, but it is a novel experience to actually WANT AI to analyze your photos. Knowing that I can train and recognize people by face or object without sending any data to the internet is something you can't really get anywhere else, it's very useful. Automatic collections, easy search.

What I actually did

Not much of anything, fully the simple setup and it's ready to use. I have definitely thought of some cool ideas but at this point none of them have become a reality.

Would I recommend it

Absolutely. Photo data is probably one of the most data-harvested digital assets we are all sharing for free. Getting off these services opened my world to the benefits of self-hosting and I think would do the same to many others if they take the plunge.