Deploy Immich on Your VPS
Deploy Immich on your VPS in one click. Your own Google Photos — phone backup, face recognition, and search-by-description, running on PostgreSQL, Redis, and its own ML service.
Immich is the self-hosted photo and video library people actually leave Google Photos for. The mobile app backs up your camera roll automatically, the timeline browses by date, place, and person, and you can search by describing a photo — "red car in the snow" — because the machine-learning service indexes your library with CLIP embeddings and face recognition. All of it happens on your own server; nothing is scanned by anyone else.
Vessl deploys the full stack: Immich's own PostgreSQL build with the vector extensions, Redis for its job queue, the machine-learning service, and the server itself. The ML service is kept off the public internet — it exposes an unauthenticated inference API that only the Immich server should reach. Create your admin account on the first visit.
What's included
- Immich server + machine learning + PostgreSQL + Redis, wired together
- Automatic phone backup with official iOS and Android apps
- Face recognition and search-by-description, computed on your server
- ML service kept internal — no unauthenticated inference endpoint exposed
- Photos and the model cache on persistent volumes
Common use cases
- Leaving Google Photos without giving up phone backup or search
- A family photo library on storage you own and can grow
- Long-term archive where the originals are yours, in full quality
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a GPU?
No, but be realistic. Face recognition and search indexing run on CPU here, so the first pass over a large library takes a long while. Everyday browsing and backup are unaffected — it is the initial indexing that is slow.
How much disk will I need?
Roughly the size of your library, plus a few GB for thumbnails and the ML models. Photos live on a persistent volume, so pick a VPS with a disk that fits the collection you plan to keep.
Why does it ship its own PostgreSQL?
Immich's search and face recognition need vector extensions, so it publishes a Postgres build with them compiled in. This template uses that image rather than a plain one, with its config preserved.
Ready to ship?
Deploy Immich in under a minute.
Connect your VPS, pick this template, fill in any required fields. Vessl handles the container, SSL, and persistent storage.
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