Self-Host Immich with Greffon: Your Own Google Photos
Your photo library is a record of your life, and it currently lives on someone else's servers. Immich brings it home. Here is the honest setup, including the parts that ask for real hardware.
A photo library is one of the most personal things you own, and for most people it sits entirely inside Google Photos or iCloud. Immich is the self-hosted alternative: phone auto-backup, search, albums, shared libraries, on a server you control. Grafting it onto a greffer keeps every photo and video on your hardware.
Why own your photos
Immich is a self-hosted photo and video backup that aims to feel like Google Photos: a mobile app that backs up automatically, a timeline, people and place search, and shared albums. The difference is where the originals live. With Immich on your greffer, they live on your disk, and the search index is built on your machine, not a provider's.
Graft it from the catalog
Pick Immich from the catalog and graft it onto your greffer. Greffon issues the certificate and routes the app, so the web UI and the mobile app connect over HTTPS from the first start, with no reverse-proxy assembly on your part.
Reach it from your phone
Auto-backup only works if your phone can reach the server from anywhere, not just at home. On your own network it works immediately. From outside, tunnel mode lets the greffer connect out and serve Immich with no inbound ports, which is the simplest path for a box behind NAT. Port forwarding plus dynamic DNS works too if you prefer to expose it directly. Either way the mobile app talks to your server over HTTPS.
The storage and memory it actually wants
This is the honest part. Photos and especially video are large, so plan disk around your real library size plus headroom, and treat storage as the thing you will add to over time. Immich also does on-device-style machine learning on the server for search and faces, which wants real memory and CPU. It will run on a modest box, but a tiny always-free ARM instance can feel slow during the first big import and while the ML catches up.
Back it up first
Self-hosting your photos means you are now the one responsible for not losing them. Greffon handles TLS and routing today, and native one-click backups are coming in M2. Until then, bring your own backup tool (restic or borgbackup), back up the Immich data and database on a schedule, and keep a copy off the greffer.
