Self-Hosted Photo Library 2026: Immich vs PhotoPrism vs Ente

By LK Wood IV · 2026-05-09 · Updated 2026-09-28 · ~12 min read · St. Louis County, MO

Immich or Ente comes down to who can open your photos. Immich runs face recognition, CLIP search and phone backup on your own server for free. The server keeps your originals as plain files. Ente runs the same kind of machine learning on your phone and stores only end-to-end encrypted objects. It runs on your server or on Ente’s cloud (10 GB free, $2.49 a month for 50 GB, read September 26, 2026). I would run Immich for a family library on a box I already secure, and Ente when the server itself is not trusted. PhotoPrism is the third choice: a browser-first library for photos you already keep in folders, with face recognition free in every edition and no phone app of its own. Versions as of September 26, 2026: Immich v3.2.2, Ente Photos mobile v1.3.64, PhotoPrism 260919.

I picked one for the family library on my own homelab in May 2026. This walkthrough explains the call, who the other two are right for, and the specific failure modes you can avoid by choosing on purpose.

Immich vs Ente, in one line

PhotoPrism is the odd one out: no native phone app of its own, and five stable builds in 2026 against Immich’s 22 releases and 22 for Ente’s mobile app.

• Pick Immich if you want a free Google-Photos-style server where faces, smart search and automatic phone backup work on server-side ML, and you accept that the originals sit on disk as plain files, protected by however well you secure the box. Immich’s own minimum is 6 GB of RAM and 2 cores.
• Pick Ente if end-to-end encryption is the point. The server stores objects it cannot read, all ML runs on your devices, storage is any S3-compatible bucket, and the server needs 1 GB of RAM. You pay with a desktop-side Google Takeout import, no server-side ML, and, on your own server, a CLI step to lift each account’s storage quota. If you would rather not run a server at all, Ente runs the same service itself.

TL;DR

Read September 26, 2026 from each project’s releases and documentation (Sources below). Immich shipped 22 stable releases and Ente’s mobile app 22 in the 38 weeks to that date, so the first two rows date fastest. A dash means no project source names one. The prices are the projects’ own list prices.

My pick

I picked Immich for the family library because its face recognition, smart search and phone apps all work for free. It has shipped 22 releases in 2026 to September 26.

If your x86 CPU lacks x86-64-v2 support, you already run a PhotoPrism library you like, or you want end-to-end encryption with on-device ML, the answer changes. Each case is below.

How I evaluated them

Three buckets:

1. What the project ships in 2026 — versions, release pace, and what is free for self-hosters.
2. What the install costs you — the project’s own hardware minimum, the CPU load during upload that KittMedia measured, disk, and how the phone app behaves.
3. What happens when something goes wrong — backup, leaving the platform, encryption, and release pace.

The figures come from each project’s documentation and GitHub releases, read September 26, 2026. The RAM minimums are each project’s own, and the measured comparison is KittMedia’s.

Immich

Status, September 26, 2026. The current release is v3.2.2 (September 15), a one-fix patch on v3.2.1 (September 14) and v3.2.0 (September 10) (releases). v3.2.0 added a Docker Compose builder, a redesigned search panel, a new search API, tag triggers in Workflows, a memories page and “cluster groups” that recognise the same people across trusted users. The catch is in that last one. Joining a group requires resetting facial recognition for everyone in it, and “names and birth dates will be lost” (v3.2.0 notes). Immich shipped 22 stable releases between January 1 and September 26, 2026; six were minor or major versions (2.5.0, 2.6.0, 2.7.0, 3.0.0, 3.1.0 and 3.2.0).

v3.0 raised the hardware floor. The v3.0.0 release (July 1, 2026) brought mobile non-destructive editing, a Workflows automation builder (preview), HLS real-time transcoding (preview), integrity checks, and slideshow and OCR in the mobile app. Most of its breaking changes are API changes that affect third-party tools. It also dropped pgvecto.rs. An install that never moved to VectorChord has to migrate first. The change that matters on old homelab hardware: since v3, the machine-learning container on x86 (amd64) needs the x86-64-v2 microarchitecture level. Immich says most CPUs released since about 2012 support it. Older chips stop at v2.7.5. In a VM, pick a supported CPU type (requirements).

The ML stack runs on your server. Face detection and recognition, CLIP smart search and OCR run in the immich-machine-learning container (OCR joined that pipeline in v2.2.0), and the embeddings live in Postgres through VectorChord (Postgres docs). Hardware acceleration covers more than the other two (ML acceleration docs):

• CUDA: NVIDIA, compute capability 5.2 or higher, driver 545 or newer (CUDA 12.3).
• OpenVINO: Intel GPUs such as Iris Xe and Arc.
• ROCm: AMD; the ROCm image needs at least 35 GiB of free disk.
• ARM NN: Mali GPUs only, FP32 by default.
• RKNN: Rockchip RK3566, RK3568, RK3576 and RK3588.
• Video transcoding, a separate list: NVENC, Quick Sync, RKMPP and VAAPI (transcoding docs).

What it needs. Immich’s minimum is 6 GB of RAM and 2 cores. It recommends 8 GB and 4 cores. A 4 GB system can run it with machine learning disabled (requirements). The Postgres data belongs on local SSD, never a network share. Immich also advises against running Docker inside an LXC container. That matters on Proxmox. The one first-hand side-by-side I found, KittMedia’s from June 2025 on a Ryzen 5 PRO 2400GE, saw Immich at more than 900 MiB while playing a video and peaking at 1.6 GiB and about 25% CPU during an upload. The same library took more than 24 hours to import into Immich and about 4 into Ente. That is one library on 2025 versions. For disk, Glukhov’s guide says to plan for about 1.15 times the library size, for thumbnails and extra resolutions.

Storage. Media goes to a filesystem path, UPLOAD_LOCATION, and Immich’s FAQ shows a network share mounted as a Docker volume for it (FAQ). The database is Postgres 14 to 19 with VectorChord (Immich’s stated range is 14 or newer, below 20). Background jobs queue through Redis via BullMQ (architecture docs). The v3.2.2 compose file runs Valkey 9 there. For object storage, look at Ente.

Mobile. Native iOS and Android apps back up in the background. Since v3.0 they also edit non-destructively and read text with OCR, though v3.0 dropped three things from mobile editing: recoloring, live photos, and assets that exist only on the phone.

Pick Immich if you want everything included free, you have a server with 8 GB of RAM and 4 cores (Immich’s recommendation) and, on x86, a CPU that supports x86-64-v2, and you do not need end-to-end encryption.

PhotoPrism

Status, September 26, 2026. PhotoPrism ships date-stamped builds. The current stable is 260919-28c46a116 (September 19, 2026) (releases). It brings new face detection and embedding models. They find more faces, including small ones in group pictures, and keep different people apart. An existing library keeps its current model until you run photoprism faces migrate, which re-embeds every face and keeps the names already assigned (release notes). The same build adds Private and Hidden people, Insta360 360° files, MapLibre GL JS v6 maps (which need WebGL 2) and a 5 GB default file-size limit. Five stable builds have shipped in 2026: March 5, May 23, June 1, July 28 and September 19. The preview build 260926 adds an --onnx-provider option to run face recognition on an NVIDIA GPU; until that reaches a stable build, face recognition runs on the CPU.

Face recognition is free; the paid tiers buy administration. PhotoPrism Community Edition is AGPL and free, and its editions page (read September 26, 2026) marks People & Faces, Duplicate Detection and RAW images as included in every self-hosted edition, so the paid tiers sell extras around them: Essentials (€2 a month, billed annually) adds 3D vector and satellite maps, enhanced geocoding and the User and Viewer roles; Plus (from €6 a month) adds the admin web UI, hardened security and private chat. The same page lists PikaPods as a fully managed host from $6.50 a month. The catches are on the phone and in the release pace.

Hardware. PhotoPrism asks for at least 2 cores, 3 GB of RAM, a 64-bit OS and 4 GB of swap (getting started). RAM should match the core count. In the stable build, hardware acceleration is for video transcoding only: Intel Quick Sync and VA-API, NVIDIA, Vulkan, Apple Video Toolbox, or a Raspberry Pi (transcoding docs). The database is MariaDB 10.5.12 or newer, or SQLite 3, which PhotoPrism calls “generally not a good choice for users who require scalability and high performance”.

Mobile is the weak spot. PhotoPrism ships an official PWA (PWA docs) and lists three native apps that other companies and individual developers maintain (Gallery for PhotoPrism, PhotoSync, Stream) (native apps docs). If the family lives on iPhones, this is where PhotoPrism loses.

Pick PhotoPrism if the library already lives in folders you browse from a desktop, a PWA on the phone is acceptable, and its five stable builds from January 1 to September 26, 2026 are a feature rather than a worry.

Ente Photos (self-hosted)

Status, September 26, 2026. The mobile app is at v1.3.64 (GitHub release photos-v1.3.64, an Android build, September 24), after v1.3.63 on September 7; that makes 22 mobile-app releases between January 1 and September 26 (releases). The desktop app is at v1.7.29 (September 9) (desktop releases). The server, Museum, has no GitHub release of its own. The quickstart pulls ghcr.io/ente/server with no version tag, and Ente’s upgrade page says to replace any ghcr.io/ente-io/ image reference with ghcr.io/ente/ before pulling (upgrade docs).

This is the only end-to-end encrypted option. All ML runs on the device with ONNX Runtime: MobileCLIP for search, YOLO5Face for face detection and MobileFaceNet for face embeddings, and the indexes are encrypted before they are stored on the server (ML architecture page). Cure53 audited Ente in a CERN-sponsored review (Ente’s post of November 3, 2025), and its new Rust crypto layer passed an independent review by winfunc (April 3, 2026) (blog).

The server is small. Museum (Go), Postgres and any S3-compatible storage; the quickstart ships MinIO for the objects (object storage docs). Ente’s minimum is 1 GB of RAM and 1 core, with Docker Compose 2.30 or newer (requirements). In KittMedia’s June 2025 comparison the Ente server apps used 130-150 MiB and the S3 store 300-500 MiB while playing a video. Uploads barely registered on the server. The phone does that work.

Two admin steps the quickstart leaves to you. The first account registered is treated as the admin until you whitelist one in museum.yaml. Register yours first on anything reachable from outside (user management). And each account’s storage quota and validity are raised with the Ente CLI: ente admin update-subscription -a ADMIN_EMAIL -u USER_EMAIL --no-limit (CLI docs).

2026 features. February’s update added likes and comments, plus an admin role. March brought an offline gallery and ML improvements, April added Memory Lane, and on September 9 came library sharing for families and on-device ML that Ente says is up to 10 times faster (blog).

Or let Ente run it. Ente’s cloud gives 10 GB free, then $2.49 a month for 50 GB, $4.99 for 200 GB, $9.99 for 1,000 GB and $19.99 for 2,000 GB (pricing, read September 26, 2026). The encryption model does not change.

E2E has a cost. The server cannot read your photos. Ente’s Google Takeout import runs in the desktop app on your computer, and a more powerful server will not speed up its on-device ML.

Pick Ente if end-to-end encryption is non-negotiable, you want S3 storage or the smallest server, or you would rather pay Ente than run a server at all.

Backup, restore, and lock-in

A self-hosted photo library is only as safe as the backup you actually run.

Immich stores originals under UPLOAD_LOCATION as ordinary files. An rsync to a second disk covers the photos. Albums and faces live in Postgres. Immich writes automatic database backups to UPLOAD_LOCATION/backups, by default daily at 2:00 AM and keeping the last 14, but they hold metadata only, so they are no use in a restore unless a copy of the originals travels with them. Restores run from the web interface (backup and restore docs). To walk away, immich-go has an archive from-immich command that writes the library to a folder.

PhotoPrism keeps its index in MariaDB (or SQLite) and your photos in the originals folder. It also writes a YAML sidecar for each photo and YAML backups of albums, which let you view and restore album and photo metadata even without a database backup (export docs).

Ente is the most awkward to back up. Back up its Postgres database and encrypted object store together, because the photos cannot be decrypted without the per-file keys the database holds (backup docs). The export that gives you usable files is the desktop app’s Export Data, which writes a local copy and can keep syncing it, or the Ente CLI (export docs). If you want to leave Ente later, plan it from a healthy desktop.

Whichever you pick, back up the originals and the database to a different physical disk and a different building. The 3-2-1 rule covers family photos too.

Migration off Google Photos

All three read a Google Takeout. Immich’s route is immich-go’s upload from-google-photos, which the Immich Google Photos migration walkthrough on this site takes step by step. PhotoPrism indexes the extracted Takeout from its originals or import folder and reads dates and locations from each photo’s JSON file, but it does not import Google’s albums yet (Google Photos docs); Ente imports in its desktop app and recommends extracting the ZIPs into one parent folder first, so each file meets its metadata (Ente Takeout guide). Budget disk for the move. A 200 GB library arrives as roughly 200 GB of ZIPs; PhotoPrism and Ente want them extracted, which is another 200 GB before the library lands on the server, so I would keep 600 GB free until the import is done. immich-go reads the ZIPs as they are, which saves the extraction.

Moving between the three is harder than leaving Google. Dates are what break. A user moving an Immich library into Ente reported videos landing on the import date because the XMP sidecars were not read (ente#9385). Export with sidecars, import one test folder, and check the dates before moving everything.

If your library lives on a separate NAS or storage VM, this is a good moment to revisit storage layout. The Proxmox + TrueNAS + Unraid post on this site walks through which backend handles the photo-library access pattern best — sequential writes during ingest, then bursty random reads at thumbnail-rendering time. See Proxmox vs TrueNAS vs Unraid storage backends 2026 for the IOPS math.

What I’d do on day one

1. Spin up a mini PC or VM with 4 cores and 16 GB of RAM: Immich’s recommended core count, twice its recommended RAM, and enough for any of the three. The best mini-PCs for homelab in 2026 shortlist works for all three projects.
2. On x86, confirm the CPU (or the CPU type the VM is given) supports x86-64-v2 before installing Immich v3.
3. If you have an NVIDIA GPU, point Immich’s ML at CUDA before the first import, so the first indexing pass over a large library runs on it.
4. Run a 5,000-photo trial import before pointing the family at it. Check face recognition on real subjects, check the iOS background backup, and give it one weekend before committing.
5. Back up the originals and the database separately. The originals are a filesystem; copy them with rsync. The database has the faces, albums and embeddings, and Immich already dumps it nightly into UPLOAD_LOCATION/backups for you to copy off the box.

Spinning up a Proxmox host for any of these? The ZFS on Proxmox guide covers pool setup and ARC tuning — photo ingest is write-heavy and ZFS compression with dataset isolation is the right way to organize photo storage separately from VM disks. For access from anywhere, the Tailscale tutorial gets remote photo library access working without a public port. The full self-hosted stack (Immich + Jellyfin + Vaultwarden + 9 more) is mapped out in the 12 best self-hosted apps article.

Sources

• Immich releases, requirements and backup and restore documentation – versions, the 6 GB minimum and x86-64-v2 floor, and the automatic database backups; product-key prices from Immich’s product-key post (July 18, 2024).
• PhotoPrism releases, release notes, getting-started documentation and editions page – builds, the 3 GB minimum, and what each edition includes.
• Ente releases, self-hosting quickstart, requirements and CLI administration – app versions, the 1 GB minimum, and the per-account storage quota.
• KittMedia, “Ente vs. Immich – a comparison” (June 16, 2025) – the one first-hand RAM, CPU and import-time comparison quoted here.