Replace Google Photos with a NAS: Complete Setup Guide (Synology + Immich)

Google Photos is probably the hardest Google service to leave. Not because the alternatives are bad—they've gotten remarkably good—but because Google Photos is genuinely excellent software backed by practically unlimited computing resources. The search, the auto-albums, the "memories" that pop up and make you nostalgic about a Tuesday in 2019. It's good. Painfully good.

But there are real reasons to leave, and they go beyond abstract privacy concerns. Google Photos' free unlimited storage ended years ago. The 15 GB you share across Gmail, Drive, and Photos fills up fast when every phone photo is a 4MB HEIF file. And then there's the elephant in the room: Google explicitly uses your photos to train their AI models. Every face, every location, every object in your pictures helps train Google's computer vision systems. You're not just storing photos—you're contributing to a training dataset.

The solution I landed on after months of research and testing: a Synology NAS running Immich. One-time hardware cost, unlimited local storage, an experience that's surprisingly close to Google Photos, and complete ownership of your data. Here's exactly how to set it up.

Why Leave Google Photos

Let me lay out the specific reasons, because "privacy" alone isn't convincing enough for most people to go through the effort of migrating thousands of photos.

Storage limits are real now. Google killed unlimited photo storage in June 2021. The free 15 GB you get is shared with Gmail and Google Drive. A typical smartphone user takes 1,000-2,000 photos per year. At 3-5 MB each (modern phones), you're looking at 3-10 GB annually. That 15 GB disappears fast, and then Google starts nudging you toward Google One subscriptions. $2.99/month for 100 GB, $9.99/month for 2 TB. For the rest of your life.

Your photos train Google's AI. Google's terms of service allow them to use your content to "develop, train, and improve Google services and machine learning technologies." That means your family photos, your kid's face, your home interior, your vacation locations—all of it potentially feeds into Google's AI training pipeline. You can opt out of some personalization, but the underlying data processing rights remain broad.

Account lockout risk. If Google suspends your account for any reason—a false-positive content policy violation, a payment dispute, an automated system flagging something incorrectly—you lose access to your photos along with everything else. People have lost years of irreplaceable family photos this way. Storing your only copy of irreplaceable memories on a platform you don't control is a risk most people don't think about until it's too late.

Vendor lock-in gets worse over time. The longer you stay, the harder it gets to leave. Google knows this. Every year you add another few thousand photos, another year of memories that become increasingly painful to migrate. The best time to leave was years ago. The second best time is now, while your library is still manageable.

Hardware You'll Need

I'm recommending Synology NAS devices specifically because they hit the sweet spot of being reliable, having excellent software, and being approachable for people who aren't sysadmins. QNAP and TrueNAS are fine alternatives if you prefer them, but the Synology ecosystem is the most beginner-friendly by a wide margin.

Here are two builds depending on your budget and library size:

For most people with a photo library under 1 TB, the DS224+ budget build is plenty. The 4-bay model only makes sense if you already have a large library, plan to store video, or want the flexibility to add more drives later without buying a new unit.

Option A: Synology Photos (Easy Mode)

If you want the simplest possible replacement and don't mind a less polished experience, Synology Photos comes built into every Synology NAS. No extra setup, no Docker, no command line. Install the package from the Synology Package Center and you're running in two minutes.

What it does well: Automatic photo backup from your phone (iOS and Android apps available), face recognition, location-based albums, timeline view, sharing albums with family. It handles the core use case—get photos off my phone and into a browsable library—competently. The web interface is clean and the mobile app works reliably for both browsing and auto-upload.

Where it falls short: The UI feels about five years behind Google Photos. Search is basic—face recognition and location work, but you can't search "photos of dogs at the beach" the way you can with Google's AI-powered search. Performance can be sluggish with large libraries (50,000+ photos). The mobile app is functional but not delightful. Sharing and collaboration features are limited compared to Google Photos' shared libraries.

Best for: People who want the simplest possible setup, aren't particularly tech-savvy, and mainly need automatic backup with basic browsing. If "get my photos off Google and onto hardware I own" is your primary goal and you don't need bells and whistles, Synology Photos gets the job done with minimal effort.

Option B: Immich (Power User Mode)

Immich is the one that gets people excited. It's an open-source, self-hosted photo management platform that's explicitly designed as a Google Photos replacement—and it shows. The interface looks and feels like Google Photos in a way that nothing else in the self-hosted space comes close to. Timeline view, map view, face recognition, object detection, search by content ("sunset", "cat", "birthday cake"), shared albums, partner sharing, memories/flashbacks. It's all there.

Immich runs as a Docker container, which sounds intimidating if you've never used Docker, but on a Synology NAS it's straightforward. I'll walk you through every step below. The project has been developing rapidly—they hit version 1.0 in early 2026 and it's genuinely production-ready now. The development team is active, releases are frequent, and the community is large and helpful.

What it does well: The AI-powered search is legitimately impressive for a self-hosted tool. It runs machine learning models locally on your NAS (no cloud needed) for face recognition, object detection, and CLIP-based semantic search. The mobile app (iOS and Android) is polished, supports background photo backup, and feels native. The web interface is fast and responsive. Partner sharing lets you and a spouse/partner share your libraries seamlessly, just like Google Photos' partner account feature.

Where it falls short: It needs more RAM than Synology Photos (4 GB minimum, 8 GB recommended for machine learning features). Initial setup takes 30-45 minutes instead of 2. The machine learning features run slowly on a Celeron—initial processing of a large library can take days, though it's a one-time thing. And while it's very stable as of v1.x, it's still a younger project than established alternatives.

Best for: Anyone who wants the closest possible experience to Google Photos while owning their data. If you're comfortable spending 30-45 minutes on setup and want a photo app that doesn't feel like a compromise, Immich is the answer.

Step-by-Step: Setting Up Immich on Synology

Here's the exact process. I'm assuming you have a Synology NAS running DSM 7.2+ with Container Manager (Docker) installed from the Package Center. If you haven't installed Container Manager yet, do that first—it's free in the Synology Package Center.

/docker/immich/
/docker/immich/db/
/docker/immich/model-cache/
/photos/immich/

services:
  immich-server:
    container_name: immich_server
    image: ghcr.io/immich-app/immich-server:release
    volumes:
      - /volume1/photos/immich:/usr/src/app/upload
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
    environment:
      - DB_PASSWORD=your_secure_password_here
      - DB_USERNAME=postgres
      - DB_DATABASE_NAME=immich
      - REDIS_HOSTNAME=immich_redis
      - DB_HOSTNAME=immich_postgres
    ports:
      - 2283:2283
    depends_on:
      - redis
      - database
    restart: always

  immich-machine-learning:
    container_name: immich_machine_learning
    image: ghcr.io/immich-app/immich-machine-learning:release
    volumes:
      - /volume1/docker/immich/model-cache:/cache
    restart: always

  redis:
    container_name: immich_redis
    image: docker.io/redis:6.2-alpine
    healthcheck:
      test: redis-cli ping || exit 1
    restart: always

  database:
    container_name: immich_postgres
    image: docker.io/tensorchord/pgvecto-rs:pg14-v0.2.0
    environment:
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: your_secure_password_here
      POSTGRES_USER: postgres
      POSTGRES_DB: immich
      POSTGRES_INITDB_ARGS: '--data-checksums'
    volumes:
      - /volume1/docker/immich/db:/var/lib/postgresql/data
    healthcheck:
      test: pg_isready --dbname='immich' --username='postgres' || exit 1
      interval: 10s
      start_interval: 30s
      start_period: 5m
    restart: always

Mobile App Setup (Automatic Photo Backup)

This is the make-or-break feature. If photos don't back up from your phone automatically, you'll never use this. Good news: Immich's mobile app handles this well.

1. Install the app. Search "Immich" on the App Store (iOS) or Google Play Store (Android). It's free.

2. Connect to your server. Open the app and enter your server URL. If you're on your home network, use http://your-nas-ip:2283. Log in with the account you created.

3. Enable automatic backup. Go to the app's backup settings. Toggle on automatic backup. Choose which albums to back up (Camera Roll at minimum, but you can include Screenshots, Downloads, WhatsApp images, etc.). Choose whether to include videos. Set it to back up on Wi-Fi only unless you have an unlimited data plan.

4. Initial upload. The first backup will upload your entire camera roll. On Wi-Fi, expect roughly 1-2 hours per 10 GB depending on your network speed. After that, new photos upload within minutes of being taken.

5. Remote access (optional). If you want to access your photos outside your home network, you have two options: (a) set up a Tailscale VPN (free for personal use, takes 10 minutes, highly recommended), or (b) set up a reverse proxy with a domain name. Tailscale is the simpler and more secure option. Install it on your NAS and your phone, and your NAS is accessible from anywhere via a private network. No port forwarding, no exposing your NAS to the internet.

Migrating from Google Photos

Here's how to get your existing Google Photos library into Immich. Google makes it possible, but they don't make it pleasant—shocking, I know.

Step 1: Request your data via Google Takeout. Go to takeout.google.com. Deselect everything, then select only Google Photos. Choose "Export once" (not scheduled). Select .zip format, 50 GB max file size. Click "Create export". Google will email you when it's ready—this can take hours or even a day for large libraries.

Step 2: Download the archives. You'll get one or more .zip files. Download them all. For a 200 GB library, expect around 4-5 zip files.

Step 3: Extract and deal with Google's annoying format. Here's the painful part: Google Takeout exports photos with metadata split into separate .json sidecar files. The EXIF data in the actual images is often incomplete or missing. The folder structure is a mess of dated albums and random groupings. You'll need to merge the JSON metadata back into the photos.

Use the Immich CLI tool for this—it's specifically designed to handle Google Takeout imports and automatically merges the metadata. Install it via npm:

npm i -g @immich/cli
immich login http://your-nas-ip:2283/api your-api-key
immich upload --recursive /path/to/extracted/takeout/

You can get your API key from the Immich web UI under Account Settings → API Keys. The CLI handles de-duplication, so if you accidentally upload some photos twice, they won't create duplicates.

Step 4: Verify and clean up. After the upload completes, browse your library in Immich. Check that dates look correct, locations are preserved, and faces are being detected. If some photos have wrong dates (common with Google Takeout), you can batch-edit dates in Immich's web interface. The machine learning system will start processing everything for search and face detection automatically.

3-Year Cost Comparison

Here's where the NAS starts to look very attractive. Let's run the numbers for someone with a 500 GB photo library that grows by about 100 GB per year.

At the 3-year mark, the budget NAS is only $120 more than Google One—and you get double the storage with full data ownership. But the real savings start in year 4 and beyond, because the NAS keeps running for free while Google keeps charging $120/year.

The financial argument is clear: if you need more than 100 GB of storage (and most photo libraries cross that threshold within a few years), a NAS saves money in the medium term and pays for itself completely in the long term. You also get a NAS that can do a hundred other things—file server, media server, backup target, Docker host. The photos are just one use case.

And that's just the dollar math. The privacy and ownership benefits are the reason you're reading this article in the first place. No AI training on your family photos. No account lockout risk. No terms of service changes. Your hardware, your rules.

Which Option Should You Pick?

My recommendation for most readers: go with Immich on a Synology DS224+. The setup isn't hard (you literally just followed the steps above), the experience is genuinely close to Google Photos, and you'll own your data completely. The DS224+ with two 4 TB drives costs about the same as 3.5 years of Google One 2 TB storage, gives you double the capacity, and serves you indefinitely.

Check Synology DS224+ price on Amazon →

If you haven't started de-Googling yet, replacing Google Photos alongside moving your email to a privacy-respecting provider like ProtonMail covers the two most personal categories of data Google holds on you: your communications and your memories. Those two changes alone massively reduce Google's footprint in your life.

Your photos are your memories. They're pictures of your kids growing up, your vacations, your friends, your life. They're too important to be someone else's training data. Bring them home.