iCloud Photos vs Immich
iCloud Photos and Immich are both photo management software. iCloud Photos is a commercial product from Apple Inc. Immich is open source under AGPL-3.0, with 118k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick iCloud Photos when
- Your household uses Apple devices and wants photos synced everywhere without extra apps.
- Pick Immich when
- You want Google Photos-style backup and search on your own server for a household or small group.
Side by side
Syncs your photo library across iPhone, iPad and Mac through iCloud, with shared libraries and optional end-to-end encryption.
A self-hosted photo and video library with automatic phone backup, timeline, albums, sharing, face recognition and AI search, positioned as a Google Photos replacement.
Awkward on Windows and Android, and exporting a large library out of iCloud is slow.
Needs a reasonably capable server and your own backup plan; the project itself warns not to treat it as your only copy.
Production-ready (both)
Cloud service, mobile app and desktop app
Self-hosted server and mobile app
Not published
TypeScript, NestJS, SvelteKit, Dart and PostgreSQL
Closed source, sold by Apple Inc.
Open source, AGPL-3.0 (network copyleft)
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
Use inside your business is unrestricted. If you change it and let customers use it over the internet, you must publish your changes.
19k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
118k GitHub stars
Not known
Established: started 4 years ago, latest release v3.3.5.
Other comparisons
More photo management apps
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.