The $600 Family Photo Server

Be honest about the money first

Most self-hosting guides open by telling you how much you'll save. That's usually a lie of omission, so here's the real arithmetic.

A cloud photo plan big enough for a family runs somewhere around [FILL: check today's Google One 2TB price] per month. This build costs roughly $540 up front plus about $6/month for encrypted offsite backup — because a server in your basement is not a backup, and I'll die on that hill.

Straight payback against a 2TB plan lands somewhere in the three-to-five year range. That's real but it's not thrilling, and if someone tells you it pays for itself in six months, they're selling something.

What you're building

Immich is an open-source, self-hosted photo library that is — genuinely, not as a consolation prize — a close match for Google Photos. Phone apps for iOS and Android with background auto-upload, face recognition and grouping, search by content ("beach", "dog", "receipts"), albums, shared albums, timeline, memories. It runs in Docker on hardware you own.

When this build is finished you have:

• Your entire Google Photos export imported with dates, albums, and location data intact
• Automatic phone backup for everyone in the house — it just works in the background like Google's did
• Hardware-accelerated thumbnail and video transcoding, so browsing is instant instead of a slideshow of spinners
• Face and content search running locally — the machine learning happens in your house, on your photos, and nothing leaves
• Remote access from anywhere with zero ports forwarded to the internet
• Encrypted offsite backup on a schedule, with a restore you've actually tested

The parts list

This is the cheap, boring, reliable build. There's no reason to buy anything new here — refurbished enterprise gear is the entire trick, and it's why the number is $540 instead of $1,500.

The build, end to end

1. Get your data out of Google first

Do this before you buy anything, because the export takes days and it's the step most likely to surprise you. Google Takeout, select Photos only, choose 50GB archive chunks. Google emails you download links that expire in a week, so start it on a Friday when you'll be around.

2. Install the OS and set up the mirror

Ubuntu Server LTS, minimal install, on the NVMe. Then mirror the two spinning drives so either one can fail without taking your library with it:

# two 8TB drives, mirrored — either can die and you keep everything
sudo apt install -y mdadm
sudo mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda /dev/sdb
sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/md0
sudo mkdir -p /srv/photos && sudo mount /dev/md0 /srv/photos

Add it to /etc/fstab so it survives a reboot. Then pull a drive out while it's running and confirm everything still works. A mirror you haven't tested is a rumour.

3. Immich

Docker Compose, straight from the official docs. Two things in the config actually matter and both are easy to get wrong:

• Point the upload volume at your mirror (/srv/photos), not at the boot SSD. People fill their 1TB NVMe and wonder why everything stopped.
• Enable the hardware transcoding profile. It's a separate override file, it is not on by default, and skipping it is the number one reason people say Immich is slow.

4. Prove hardware transcoding is actually on

This is where most builds silently fail. Immich will happily fall back to CPU transcoding without telling you — it works, it's just ten times slower and pins every core. Start a library scan and watch the chip:

# Intel QuickSync — should show non-zero engine usage during a scan
sudo apt install -y intel-gpu-tools
sudo intel_gpu_top

# NVIDIA — look for the container in the process list
nvidia-smi dmon

If those stay flat while your CPU sits at 100%, it's not working. Fix it now — before you import 40,000 photos and spend two days waiting.

5. Remote access, without exposing anything

Do not port-forward this to the internet. You'd be putting a database full of pictures of your children on the public internet behind software you're not going to patch every week.

Install Tailscale on the server and on every phone in the house. It builds a private encrypted network between your own devices. Your firewall stays completely closed, and the Immich app on your phone reaches the server from anywhere in the world as if you were on the couch. Setup is about five minutes and it's free at family scale.

6. Backup — the step everyone skips

A mirror protects you from a dead drive. It does nothing about fire, theft, flood, a bad power supply cooking both drives at once, or you deleting the wrong album at 1am.

# encrypted, versioned, offsite — runs nightly
restic -r s3:s3.us-west-000.backblazeb2.com/your-bucket backup /srv/photos

# and the part that actually matters:
restic -r s3:... restore latest --target /tmp/restore-test --include /srv/photos/2019

Four things that broke when I did this

None of these are in the official docs. All four cost me hours, and every one of them will happen to you in some form.

Should you actually do this?

Or I'll set it up for you — $199