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How to Self-Host Immich on a VPS (2026)

Published October 7, 2026  ·  5 min read  ·  Galaxy Cloud Solutions

If you've used Google Photos, Immich will feel familiar. It's an open source app with a phone app that uploads your camera roll in the background, a timeline you can scroll through, albums, sharing, and search that can find faces and things in your pictures. The difference is that the photos live on a server you rent instead of on a big company's servers.

It suits people who want the family photos somewhere they control, or who are tired of a storage subscription that keeps going up as the library grows. You do need to be comfortable owning a server and keeping your own backups. If you'd rather never think about any of that, a hosted service is still the easier road.

Immich is in our one-click installer, and we tested it on our current Ubuntu 24.04 and Rocky Linux 9 images this week before writing this.

⚡ Run Immich on Galaxy 2 for $35/mo, use code LAUNCH2026 for 50% off

What it needs

Immich is one of the heavier apps we offer. Its developers list 6 GB of RAM as the minimum and 8 GB as recommended, with 2 CPU cores minimum and 4 recommended. Most of that goes to the machine learning side, which does the face recognition and search.

That puts it on Galaxy 2: 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 160 GB storage and 3 TB of transfer for $35 a month. That meets Immich's recommended numbers, not just the minimum. For a big library, Supernova has 8 vCPU, 16 GB RAM and 320 GB of storage for $65. The smaller plans don't have the memory, so the control panel won't install Immich on them.

Installing it from the control panel

Order a Galaxy 2 or larger. Ubuntu 24.04 is the default operating system and it's what I'd use, though Rocky Linux 9 also passed our tests.

Once the server is up, log in to the client portal, open your VPS and expand the One-Click App Installer section. Immich is under Media & Files, or you can type it into the search box. Click it and you'll get an email when it's done. In our tests that took about four minutes on Ubuntu 24.04 and five to six on Rocky Linux 9.

Before you visit it, open the port. On the same VPS page, under Firewall Rules, add a rule for port 2283, protocol TCP, from any source, because your phone needs to reach it from wherever you are. Your server starts with everything closed except SSH.

Then open http://YOUR-IP:2283 in your browser, with your server's IP address in place of YOUR-IP.

Don't worry if the page doesn't load straight away. Immich runs several containers, and they keep starting up for a while after the installer finishes. Give it up to five minutes. If it still won't load after that, open a ticket and I'll take a look.

Setting it up

The first person to sign up becomes the admin, so register your own account as soon as the page loads. You can add accounts for the rest of the family afterwards.

Next, install the Immich app on your phone. It's on iOS and Android. When it asks for the server, enter http://YOUR-IP:2283, log in, and turn on backup so your camera roll uploads by itself.

Start with a few hundred photos rather than your whole library. Immich works through every photo after it arrives, making thumbnails, finding faces and indexing it for search. On this server all of that runs on the CPU, so a huge first upload keeps it busy for a while. A small batch lets you check everything looks right first.

Logging in over plain HTTP by IP is fine for getting started. Before you rely on it from hotel or café Wi-Fi, point a domain at the server and put it behind HTTPS.

Before you move your photos over

Your whole library will live on one server's disk, so think about two things first.

Space: Galaxy 2 has 160 GB, and that's shared with the operating system and Immich itself. Immich's docs say thumbnails and transcoded videos add about 10 to 20 percent on top of the library. Check how big yours really is before moving it all.

Backups, which matter more: Immich on one server is not a backup. If the only copy of your photos is on this VPS, one mistake or one bad disk could take them with it. Current versions of Immich make a nightly database backup, but its own docs point out that those database backups hold only metadata, not your photos or videos. On our install the photos are in /opt/immich/upload. Copy that folder somewhere else on a schedule, and keep the originals on your phone or computer until you have. Immich recommends a 3-2-1 plan: three copies, on two kinds of storage, with one somewhere else. Our guide on how to back up a VPS covers the basics.

With a real backup behind it, the VPS becomes the place you browse and share your photos, and Immich is a lovely way to get off a subscription. Galaxy 2 is where I'd start.