Alternatives / Google Photos
These options range from full personal photo clouds with automatic backups and AI search to traditional self-hosted galleries for curated albums. Immich and Ente are the closest Google Photos-style replacements; Lychee and Piwigo focus more on gallery management and publishing.
Written by Maxime DERAME
Last updated:
Google Photos combines mobile backup, cloud storage, organization, AI search, face recognition, albums, sharing, video processing, maps, apps, and managed infrastructure. With a self-hosted alternative, you gain control over storage and infrastructure but take responsibility for capacity, backups, updates, HTTPS, database backups, transcoding, machine-learning workloads, and remote access.
Self-hosting and end-to-end encryption address different privacy concerns. Immich lets you choose where the server runs, but the server processes and can access media. Ente encrypts photos and metadata on the device so the storage provider is designed not to access the unencrypted library; this adds cryptographic complexity and can limit server-side workflows.
Immich supports local machine-learning features including facial recognition and semantic search. Ente also offers face detection and semantic search while retaining its encrypted architecture. Both Immich and Ente provide automatic iOS and Android backups. Lychee focuses on manual library management; Piwigo offers mobile apps and upload tools but is closer to maintaining a gallery than mirroring a phone camera roll.
Immich and Ente are personal photo clouds centered on continuous smartphone ingestion, timeline browsing, search, and multiple devices. Lychee and Piwigo are stronger for curated collections, album presentation, sharing, metadata, and photography workflows.
For automatic phone backup and a Google Photos-like timeline, start with Immich or Ente. Choose Ente when provider-side privacy through end-to-end encryption is the priority. Lychee and Piwigo suit curated galleries. Before replacing an existing cloud library, test imports and exports and make an independent backup of original files and metadata.
People look for a Google Photos alternative to self-host their library, reduce dependence on Google, use end-to-end encryption, or control where their photos are stored. Important features include automatic phone backups, timeline browsing, albums, sharing, video support, metadata management, face recognition, semantic search, and local AI processing.
| Alternative | License | GitHub stars | Mobile backup | AI search | Face recognition | E2EE | Self-hosted |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Immich | AGPL-3.0 | ~114.9k | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Ente Photos | AGPL-3.0 | ~29.1k | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Lychee | MIT | ~4.3k | Limited | No | No | No | Yes |
| Piwigo | GPL-2.0 | ~3.9k | Yes / mobile apps | Limited | Plugin-dependent | No | Yes |
Want the closest self-hosted Google Photos replacement
Immich combines automatic mobile backups, timeline browsing, albums, sharing, facial recognition, semantic search, maps, video playback, and native mobile apps.
Want end-to-end encrypted photo storage
Ente encrypts photos and metadata on the device before upload, while offering automatic backups, albums, sharing, face recognition, and semantic search.
Want the largest open-source community
Immich has by far the most GitHub stars in this comparison and is very actively developed; keep deployments updated as the project evolves quickly.
Want hosted convenience with open-source software
Ente offers a managed hosted service and publishes its clients and server; self-hosting is also available for users who want to operate the stack.
Want a simple self-hosted photo gallery
Lychee is suited to manually organizing and sharing curated albums, with a straightforward web gallery and permissive MIT license.
Want a mature photography platform
Piwigo has a long history, mobile apps, access controls, batch operations, and a large plugin and theme ecosystem for publishing structured collections.
Need AI search and facial recognition
Immich and Ente provide semantic search and facial recognition among the projects in this list.
Want local machine learning on a self-hosted server
Immich runs machine-learning features such as face recognition and semantic search on your own deployment, with additional hardware requirements.
Prefer the most permissive license
Lychee uses MIT; Immich and Ente use AGPL-3.0, while Piwigo uses GPL-2.0.