Hello everybody,

Firstly, on behalf of the Immich team, I'd like to thank everybody for your continuous support of Immich since the very first day! Your contributions, encouragement, and community engagement have helped bring Immich to its current state. The team and I are forever grateful for that.

Since our last announcement of the core team joining FUTO to work on Immich full-time, one of the goals of our new position is to foster a healthy relationship between the developers and the users. We believe that this enables us to create great software, establish transparent policies and build trust.

We want to build a great software application that brings value to you and your loved ones' lives. We are not using you as a product, i.e., selling or tracking your data. We are not putting annoying ads into our software. We respect your privacy. We want to be compensated for the hard work we put in to build Immich for you.

With those notes, we have enabled a way for you to financially support the continued development of Immich, ensuring the software can move forward and will be maintained, by offering a lifetime license of the software. We think if you like and use software, you should pay for it, but we're never going to force anyone to pay or try to limit Immich for those who don't.

There are two types of license that you can choose to purchase: Server License and Individual License.

Server License​

This is a lifetime license costing $99.99. The license is applied to the whole server. You and all users that use your server are licensed.

Individual License​

This is a lifetime license costing $24.99. The license is applied to a single user, and can be used on any server they choose to connect to.

You can purchase the license on our page - https://buy.immich.app.

Starting with release v1.109.0 you can purchase and enter your purchased license key directly in the app.

Thank you​

Thank you again for your support, this will help create a strong foundation and stability for the Immich team to continue developing and maintaining the project that you love to use.

Cheers! 🎉

Immich team

FAQ

1. Where can I purchase a license?​

There are several places where you can purchase the license from

• https://buy.immich.app
• https://pay.futo.org
• or directly from the app.

2. Do I need both Individual License and Server License?​

No,

If you are the admin and the sole user, or your instance has less than a total of 4 users, you can buy the Individual License for each user.

If your instance has more than 4 users, it is more cost-effective to buy the Server License, which will license all the users on your instance.

3. What do I do if I don't pay?​

You can continue using Immich without any restriction.

4. Will there be any paywalled features?​

No, there will never be any paywalled features.

5. Where can I get support regarding payment issues?​

You can email us with your orderId and your email address [email protected] or on our Discord server.

Hello everybody! Alex from Immich here and I am back with another development progress update for the project.

Summer has returned once again, and the night sky is filled with stars, thank you for 38_000 shining stars you have sent to our GitHub repo! Since the last announcement several core contributors have started full time. Everything is going great with development, PRs get merged with brrrrrrr rate, conversation exchange between team members is on a new high, we met and are working with the great engineers at FUTO. The spirit is high and we have a lot of things brewing that we think you will like.

Let's go over some of the updates we had since the last post.

Container consolidation​

Reduced the number of total containers from 5 to 4 by making the microservices thread get spawned directly in the server container. Woohoo, remember when Immich had 7 containers?

Email notifications​

We added email notifications to the app with SMTP settings that you can configure for the following events

• A new account is created for you.
• You are added to a shared album.
• New media is added to an album.

Versioned docs​

You can now jump back into the past or take a peek at the unreleased version of the documentation by selecting the version on the website.

Similarity deduplication​

With more machine learning and CLIP magic, we now have similarity deduplication built into the application where it will search for closely similar images and let you decide what to do with them; i.e keep or trash.

Permanent URL for asset on the web​

The detail view for an asset now has a permanent URL so you can easily share them with your loved ones.

Web app translations​

We now have a public Weblate project which the community can use to translate the webapp to their native languages. We are planning to port the mobile app translation to this platform as well. If you would like to contribute, you can take a look here. We're already close to 50% translations -- we really appreciate everyone contributing to that!

Read-only/Editor mode on shared album​

As the owner of the album, you can choose if the shared user can edit the album or to only view the content of the album without any modification.

Better video thumbnails​

Immich now tries to find a descriptive video thumbnail instead of simply using the first frame. No more black images for thumbnails!

Public Roadmap​

We now have a public roadmap, giving you a high-level overview of things the team is working on. The first goal of this roadmap is to bring Immich to a stable release, which is expected sometime later this year. Some of the highlights include

• Auto stacking - Auto stacking of burst photos
• Basic editor - Basic photo editing capabilities
• Workflows - Automate tasks with workflows
• Fine grained access controls - Granular access controls for users and api keys
• Better background backups - Rework background backups to be more reliable
• Private/locked photos - Private assets with extra protections

Beyond the items in the roadmap, we have many many more ideas for Immich. The team and I hope that you are enjoying the application, find it helpful in your life and we have nothing but the intention of building out great software for you all!

Have an amazing Summer or Winter for those in the southern hemisphere! :D

Until next time,

Cheers! Alex

Immich is joining FUTO!

Since the beginning of this adventure, my goal has always been to create a better world for my children. Memories are priceless, and privacy should not be a luxury. However, building quality open source has its challenges. Over the past two years, it has taken significant dedication, time, and effort.

Recently, a company in Austin, Texas, called FUTO contacted the team. FUTO strives to develop quality and sustainable open software. They build software alternatives that focus on giving control to users. From their mission statement:

“Computers should belong to you, the people. We develop and fund technology to give them back.”

FUTO loved Immich and wanted to see if we’d consider working with them to take the project to the next level. In short, FUTO offered to:

• Pay the core team to work on Immich full-time
• Let us keep full autonomy about the project’s direction and leadership
• Continue to license Immich under AGPL
• Keep Immich’s development direction with no paywalled features
• Keep Immich “built for the people” (no ads, data mining/selling, or alternative motives)
• Provide us with financial, technical, legal, and administrative support

After careful deliberation, the team decided that FUTO’s vision closely aligns with our own: to build a better future by providing a polished, performant, and privacy-preserving open-source software solution for photo and video management delivered in a sustainable way.

Immich’s future has never looked brighter, and we look forward to realizing our vision for Immich as part of FUTO.

If you have more questions, we’ll host a Q&A live stream on May 9th at 3PM UTC (10AM CST). You can ask questions here, and the stream will be live here on our YouTube channel.

Cheers,

The Immich Team

---

FAQs​

What is FUTO?​

https://futo.org/what-is-futo/

Will the license change?​

No. Immich will continue to be licensed under AGPL without a CLA.

Will Immich continue to be free?​

Yes. The Immich source code will remain freely available under the AGPL license.

Is Immich getting VC funding?​

No. Venture capital implies investment in a business, often with the expectation of a future payout (exit plan). Immich is neither a business that can be acquired nor comes with a money-making exit plan.

I am currently supporting Immich through GitHub sponsors. What will happen to my donation?​

Effective immediately, all donations to the Immich organization will be canceled. In the future, we will offer an optional, modest payment option instead. Thank you to everyone who donated to help us get this far!

How is funding sustainable?​

Immich and FUTO believe a sustainable future requires a model that does not rely on users-as-a-product. To this end, FUTO advocates that users pay for good, open software. In keeping with this model, we will adopt a purchase price. This means we no longer accept donations, but — without limiting features for those who do not pay — we will soon allow you to purchase Immich through a modest payment. We encourage you to pay for the high-quality software you use to foster a healthy software culture where developers build great applications without hidden motives for their users.

When does this change take effect?​

This change takes effect immediately.

What will change?​

The following things will change as Immich joins FUTO:

• The brand, logo, and other Immich trademarks will be transferred to FUTO.
• We will stop all donations to the project.
• The core team can now dedicate our full attention to Immich
• Before the end of the year, we plan to have a roadmap for what it will take to get Immich to a stable release.
• Bugs will be squashed, and features will be delivered faster.

Hi everyone,

Alex from Immich here.

We are entering the last few weeks of 2023, and it has been quite a year for Immich. The project has grown so much in terms of users, developers, features, maturity, and the community around it. When I started working on Immich, it was simply a challenge for myself and an opportunity to learn new technologies, crafting something fun and useful for my wife during my free time to satisfy my urge to build and create things. I never thought it would become so popular and help so many people. At the end of the day, all we have is memory. I am proud that the team and I have created something to make storing and viewing those precious memories easier without restrictions and without sacrificing our privacy. As the year closes, here’s a recap of everything the project accomplished in 2023.

• Public shared links
• Favorites page
• Immich turned 1
• Material Design 3 on the mobile app
• Auto-link LivePhotos server-side
• iOS background backup
• Explore page
• CLIP search
• Search by metadata
• Responsive web app
• Archive page
• Asset descriptions
• 10,000 stars on GitHub
• Manage auth devices
• Map view
• Facial recognition, clustering, searching, renaming, and person management
• Partner sharing and unifying timeline between partners' users
• Custom storage label
• XMP sidecar reading
• RAW file formats
• Justified layout on the web
• Memories
• Multi-select via SHIFT
• Android Motion Photos
• 360° Photos
• Album description
• Album performance improvements (time buckets)
• Video hardware transcoding
• Slideshow mode on the web
• Configuration file
• External libraries
• Trash page
• Custom theme
• Asset Stacking
• 20,000 stars on GitHub
• Shared album activity and comments
• CLI v2
• Down to 5 containers (from 8)

Fun Statistics

• We have gone from the release version 1.41.0 to 1.90.0 at the time of writing. On average, we see a release every 7 days.
• According to GitHub's metrics, the immich-server container image has been pulled almost 4 million times.
• According to mobile app store metrics, we have 22,000 installations on Android and 6700 installation units on iOS (opt-in only).
• Immich is making around $1200/month on average from donations. (Thank you all so much!)
• We were guests on two podcasts:
  • Self-hosted
  • The Vergecast
• There are over 4,500 members on the Discord server.
• We have over 22,000 stars on the main GitHub repository, gaining 15,000 stars since January 2023.

Diving into the next year, the team will continue to build on the foundation we have laid out over the past year, implementing more advanced features for searching, organizing, and sharing between users. Bugs will continue to be squashed and conquered. “Shit Alex wrote'' code will continue to be replaced by beautiful, clean code from Jason, Zack, Boet, Daniel, Osorin, Mert, Fynn, Marty, Martin, and Jonathan. The team has my eternal gratitude for creating a welcoming environment for new contributors, helping, teaching, and learning from each other. I’ve realized that hardly a day has gone by where the team hasn’t been in communication about Immich related topics over the past year.

My long-term goal is to help hone Immich into a diamond in the FOSS space, where the UI, UX, development experiences, documentation, and quality are at a high standard while remaining free for everybody to use.

I hope you enjoy Immich and have a happy and peaceful holiday.

Hello, Immich fans, another month, another milestone. We hope you are staying cool and safe in this scorching hot summer across the globe.

Immich recently got some good recognition when getting to the front page of HackerNews, which helped to let more people know about the project's existence. The project will help more and more people find a solution to control the privacy of their most precious moments. And with the gain in popularity and recognition, we have gotten new users and more questions from the community than ever.

I want to express my gratitude to all the contributors and the community who have been tremendously helpful to new users' questions and provided technical support.

Below are the highlights of new features we added to the application over the past month, along with countless bug fixes and improvements across the board, from developer experience to resource optimization and UI/UX improvement. I hope you find these topics as exciting as I am.

Highlights​

• Memories feature.
• Facial recognition improvements.
• Improvements on multi selection behavior on the web.
• Shortcuts for common actions on the web.
• Support viewer for 360-panorama photos.

Hello everybody, Alex here!

I am back with another update on Immich. It has been only a month since my last update (May 18th, 2023), but it seems forever. I think the rapid releases of Immich and the amount of work make the perspective of time change in Immich’s world. We have some exciting updates that I think you will like.

Before going into detail, on behalf of the core team, I would like to thank all of you for loving Immich and contributing to the project. Thank you for helping me make Immich an enjoyable alternative solution to Google Photos so that you have complete control of your data and privacy. I know we are still young and have a lot of work to do, but I am confident we will get there with help from the community. I appreciate all of you from the bottom of my heart!