Written to be fair · Facts checked August 2, 2026
Immich gives you sovereignty with a sysadmin job attached. Sally skips the server.
Immich is a genuinely great self-hosted photo platform — 109,000 GitHub stars and the fastest growth in open-source photo history, verified August 2026. It solves storage sovereignty by making you the host. Sally solves a different problem: catalog truth and AI legibility for files that never move and a server that never exists.
The short version
Immich wins five rows below, including the big one for self-hosters: it is free, open source, and backs up your phone to hardware you own. The cost is the job — Docker Compose, Postgres, ML containers, GPU quirks and backup discipline, forever. Sally holds nothing, hosts nothing of yours by default, and ships the MCP server Immich’s team explicitly declined to build.
5
of 12 rows below go to Immich
5
go to Sally
2
are a matter of what you want, not who is better
What Immich is, as of August 2, 2026
Facts first, arguments later. If any of this has gone out of date, it is a mistake rather than a tactic — tell us and we will fix it.
- Price and license
- Free and open source (backed by FUTO), with an optional supporter license. 271 releases and 1,500+ contributors as of August 2, 2026.
- Momentum
- 109,485 GitHub stars on August 2, 2026 — up roughly 30,000 in ten months — with stable v2.0 shipped and the focus shifted to compatibility and easy upgrades. The fastest-growing photo project in open-source history.
- What running it takes
- Docker Compose with Postgres and machine-learning containers; a "beefy system" is recommended for the ML features. Documented community failure modes include Immich indexing its own thumbnails, NAS boot races, and GPU passthrough silently breaking after kernel updates. Hobbyist write-ups frame it, affectionately, as a hobby.
- AI and assistants
- Strong built-in ML: visual search and face clustering on your hardware. But the team explicitly declined to build an official MCP server (GitHub Discussion #22116); community bridges top out around 35 stars. Your assistant has no first-party door into an Immich library.
- Custody model
- Your server holds full copies of your photos. That is the point — sovereignty — and also the obligation: uptime, storage, upgrades and backups are yours.
What Immich does better than Sally
Every one of these is real, and some of them are permanent. A comparison page that cannot name the other product's advantages is an advertisement wearing a lab coat.
It is free, open source, and enormous
No subscription, 1,500+ contributors, code you can read and a community that ships constantly. Sally is a paid product run by one operator, and her code is not open source. If open source is a requirement, this comparison is already over — honorably.
It actually replaces Google Photos
Automatic phone backup, albums, sharing, a timeline, ML search — served from your own hardware. Immich is a full photo platform. Sally is a catalog and would make a terrible Google Photos replacement, because she does not host or serve your library at all.
Machine-learning search over the pixels
CLIP-style semantic search and face clustering run on your own machine. Sally’s search is over the words humans and fingerprints produced — she does not look inside images she was never given.
Total control of the whole stack
Your disks, your network, your retention rules, your GPU. For people who enjoy running infrastructure, Immich is the good kind of project — and no hosted product, Sally included, can offer that depth of control.
Side by side
Each row says who it favours. We wrote the labels before we counted them, which is why some of them say Immich.
| Feature | Sally Does Data | Immich |
|---|---|---|
| PriceImmich | 5,000 items free, then $72/year. | Free, open source; optional supporter license. |
| SetupSally | Sign up in a browser. The optional local agent is one zero-dependency binary. | Docker Compose, Postgres, ML containers, reverse proxy, storage planning — a weekend, then a hobby. |
| Hardware and maintenanceSally | None. There is no server of yours to keep alive. | A machine you own, awake and backed up, upgraded through breaking changes, forever. |
| Mobile auto-backupImmich | None. Sally does not ingest your camera roll. | First-class: the phone app backs up to your server automatically. |
| Visual (ML) searchImmich | No — search covers text, tags, people, places and dates in the catalog. | Yes — semantic search over image content, on your hardware. |
| Face handlingDepends on you | Zero face recognition by architecture; people tags are human-typed. | Face detection and clustering, run on your own server. |
| Who holds the photosDepends on you | Wherever they already live — drives, clouds, NAS. Sally keeps fingerprints and metadata; copies only if you upload them. | Your server holds full copies. Sovereign, and entirely your responsibility. |
| Your AI can query itSally | Built-in MCP server, per-item consent tiers, works with Claude today. | The team declined official MCP (Discussion #22116); community bridges are hobby-sized. |
| Provenance and dedup verdictsSally | SHA-256 plus perceptual fingerprints with a citable keeper verdict and an activity ledger. | Dedup features exist for the library it hosts; no user-facing fingerprint or provenance trail. |
| ScopeSally | Everything you point her at, across every silo — including files inside an Immich library. | The library your Immich instance hosts. |
| Community and opennessImmich | One operator, closed source, open exports. | 109k stars, 1,500+ contributors, open code. |
| Full photo platform (albums, timeline, serving)Immich | Collections and share pages over the catalog — not a media server. | A complete self-hosted photo service. |
So which one is for you?
Choose Immich if…
- You want a self-hosted Google Photos replacement and you enjoy — or at least accept — running a server.
- Automatic phone backup to hardware you own is the feature that matters most.
- You want ML visual search and face clustering without any cloud involved.
- Open source is a requirement, not a preference.
Choose Sally if…
- You want your files to stay yours without becoming a sysadmin — no Docker, no Postgres, no 3 a.m. failed-backup dread.
- Your stuff is scattered across drives, clouds and old laptops, and the first problem is knowing what exists, not serving it.
- You want your AI assistant to answer from your catalog — the door Immich decided not to build.
- You want fingerprint provenance and duplicate verdicts you can cite, not just another app’s opinion of your library.
What Sally cannot do, next to Immich
Nobody has ever regretted reading this list before signing up, and plenty of people have regretted not being shown one.
- Host, serve or back up your photo library. Sally is not a media server and never will be.
- Auto-backup your camera roll — there is no Sally capture app.
- Search inside image pixels with ML. If Sally never saw the file, she knows its fingerprint and metadata, not its content.
- Run as your own self-hosted instance. Sally is a hosted service run by one accountable operator, not a distribution.
Run the server and keep the ledger
If you love your Immich box, keep it — it is doing the storage-sovereignty job well. Point `sally go` at the same originals (the library folders on your server or the source folders that feed it) and Sally becomes the ledger above it: fingerprints, provenance, human enrichment, and an MCP window so your assistant can finally answer questions the Immich UI keeps to itself. They are complements, not rivals.
The verdict
Immich earned its momentum. It solved the real problem of getting your photos off Big Cloud and onto your own hardware, and it did it with open code and a huge community — which is why the honest tally above gives it five rows, including price. If self-hosting sounds like fun, run Immich and enjoy it.
But every "I set up Immich this weekend" post produces its own replies from people who gave up — the Docker stack, the RAM, the GPU quirk after a kernel update. Those people did not stop wanting sovereignty; they stopped wanting the job. Sally is for them: the files stay put, the server never exists, and the catalog — dedup verdicts, provenance, fidelity, the MCP door for your assistant — is the service. $72 a year is less than the electricity of a homelab.
Questions people actually ask
Immich is free. Why would I pay Sally $72 a year?
Immich is free the way a puppy is free — the price is the ongoing care. If you enjoy that, it is a great deal. Sally charges $72 because there is nothing for you to run: one binary walks your drives, and the catalog, the fingerprints and the MCP server are the service. You are paying to not have a second job.
Can Sally catalog the photos inside my Immich library?
Yes, at the file level: run `sally go` (or a manifest scan) over the originals on the machine that hosts them. Sally fingerprints the files where Immich keeps them. There is no Immich API connector today — that is a file-walk, not an integration, and we would rather say so plainly.
Is Sally open source?
No. The exports are the honesty mechanism instead: XMP sidecars, JSON-LD, CSV and a full SQLite dump at every tier, so nothing about your catalog is hostage to Sally continuing to exist — or to you continuing to pay.
Immich has ML search. Isn’t that better than typed tags?
For finding "beach sunset," yes. For knowing which of five copies is the original your grandmother scanned, ML guesses and fingerprints know. Sally bets on the second problem — and on typed, human-confirmed facts being what you want an AI citing about your family.
Where these facts came from
Checked August 2, 2026. Where we could not stand behind a link, the claim is dated and left unlinked rather than dressed up in one.
- Immich repository — star count pulled via the GitHub API on August 2, 2026
- Immich maintainers declining an official MCP server (Discussion #22116)
- Immich documentation — requirements and setup
- Community-documented failure modes (thumbnail self-indexing, NAS boot races, GPU passthrough after kernel updates), collected August 2026
The other comparisons
Sally vs Mylio Photos+
Mylio is the incumbent for exactly the person Sally serves — multi-device, multi-source, privacy-leaning families — and it earns four rows below outright. But it went subscription-only at $240 a year in March 2025, its sync architecture wants a vault computer that stays awake, and it has no answer to "let my AI see my catalog." Sally costs $72 a year, moves nothing, and ships the MCP server.
Read it →
Sally vs Google Photos
Google Photos wins the rows you would expect — effortless backup, editing magic, search over its own copy, and a free 15GB start. The catch is structural: its AI sees only what Google holds, answers only through Gemini, and since March 31, 2025 no third-party app or assistant can read your library at all. Sally is not a better Google Photos; she is the map of everything — Google’s copy included — that any assistant you consent to can read.
Read it →
✨
The cheapest way to settle this is to try it.
Five thousand items free, no card, nothing to uninstall. Point Sally at one messy folder and see whether “I did not know I had four of those” happens to you. It usually does.