Immich, the self-hosted alternative to Google Photos, iCloud Photos, and other similar services, is now officially stable. The project just reached its v2.0 release, and is now intended for anyone to try without a significant risk of bugs and stability issues.
Moving forward, Immich is adopting semantic versioning, which means future major versions (like v3.0.0) will contain breaking changes, while minor versions (like v2.1.0) should be safe for auto-updating, making life much easier for self-hosters. Plus, any v2.x.x version of the mobile app will be fully compatible with any v2.x.x version of the server, which is excellent for keeping things running smoothly.
The team didn’t just flip a switch for v2.0.0; it was also busy making some general quality-of-life improvements. The website has a fresh new look, rewritten with the team’s UI component library, and includes a new blog. The company has also updated the API documentation, which now has more details on things like authentication, along with a handy command palette for quick navigation. If you love checking stats, the community metrics on the data site have been updated to show member growth on the Discord and Reddit.
In terms of actual feature improvements in the stable release, there are some great enhancements to the mobile app experience. You now get a download progress indicator, which is a small but really helpful detail. On the Android side, the team brought back configurable backup settings, letting you choose options like only backing up while charging or after a minimum elapsed time, which gives you much more control.
Client-side hashing has also been improved to be concurrent, meaning it’s now much faster and limited mostly by how quickly your phone can read the files. This is awesome because it will make initial backups feel much snappier overall. Some nagging bugs were also fixed, like the mobile app occasionally “freezing” with thumbnails not loading, which I honestly can’t believe how frustrating that must have been for people with big libraries. Another big fix was the web app freezing after using a modal, which is a big win for usability.
Looking ahead, the team is planning to complete several roadmap items before the end of the year, including auto-stacking of burst photos and achieving full feature parity between the web and mobile apps. There’s also a focus on improved stack support, better sharing, and general ownership improvements.
One of the most interesting future plans is the introduction of additional paid services. The first one on the list is an end-to-end encrypted, off-site backup and restore feature, which will even support a “buddy backup” feature. This could be a game-changer for self-hosters who are always worried about the 3-2-1 backup strategy (two local copies and one off-site).
The most intriguing part of all this was the plan to celebrate hitting v2.0.0. The team is doing a physical Immich Stable release on a DVD. The disk comes with a fully bootable Immich instance and a selection of curated photos from the team. You can grab this (and a product key to support development) from the updated merch store, which also has some new retro-styled designs.
You can download the release on Github.
Source: Immich releases, Immich discussions