How I Organized Over 120 Thousand Photos Using My Own Home System

Like most people, I take a lot of pictures. Over the years my collection exploded into more than 120,214 photos and 6,324 videos, which add up to 1023 gigabytes (1TB). That is more than a thousand gigabytes of memories. Finding anything in that giant mess became almost impossible even with labeling folders. Some had names like "Phone Camera Download July 2024."

I wanted a way to keep all of my photos safe, organized, and easy to search without sending them to a big tech company. So I built my own system at home, and it has been one of the best things I have ever done.

What Immich Is in Simple Terms

Immich is an app you run on your own server that works kind of like Google Photos or Apple Photos, except everything stays in your control. Nothing gets uploaded to the cloud unless you choose to share it.

Immich can recognize faces, pets, places, and objects. It can search through thousands of pictures almost instantly. It feels like having my own private version of a huge photo service right in my house.

What a NAS Is and Why I Needed One

A NAS is basically a big hard drive that lives in your home and connects to your WiFi. Think of it as a personal storage box for all your files. Instead of storing your photos on your computer or phone where space fills up, the NAS holds everything safely in one place.

Mine stores every picture and video I have ever taken. It is also an instantaneous backup whenever I snap a photo on my phone, even when I'm not home, the photo goes there. This is great if anything ever happens to the phone, I won't lose my precious photos. After all, our photos are a glimpse into the past.

How I Built My System

I used two pieces of equipment. The NAS holds all the actual photos. A small home server runs Immich, which reads the photos and organizes them.

The server looks at every picture on the NAS and learns what is in each one. It sorts them by people, places, dates, and even objects. I did not have to reorganize anything. Immich did it all for me.

Now when I open the Immich app, I can search for “beach,” “sunset,” “Gabby,” or even “dog with snow,” and it finds every matching picture in a second.

How Immich Uses AI to Help Me Find Photos Fast

Immich has powerful artificial intelligence that works behind the scenes. Here is what it does in plain English.

It recognizes faces so I can pull up every photo of someone instantly. It identifies objects like boats, food, mountains, pets, cars, or lakes. It understands natural language searches. I can type things like “pictures from Christmas 2020” or “my niece at the ocean” and it gets it right. It organizes everything automatically by date, location, and what is happening in the picture.

Even with over a thousand gigabytes of photos, it works fast.

Why It is So Fast

Because Immich runs on my own server at home, it does not have to send anything across the internet or wait for cloud servers that are shared with thousands of other users. Everything is right here on my network. That is why the searches feel instant.

I Can Build This For Other People Too

Most families have years of photos stored in different places. Old phones. Laptops. USB drives. Cloud accounts. No one knows where anything is, and losing those memories is a real fear.

This system solves all of that. I can build similar setups for other people so they can finally have:

• All of their photos in one safe place

• A private system they fully own

• Super fast photo searches

• Automatic organization

• No monthly fees

• No privacy worries

Families get peace of mind and an easy way to look back on their memories. Businesses get an organized media library they can rely on.

Final Thoughts

Putting over 120 thousand photos into a system that actually makes sense sounded impossible at first. But using a NAS for storage and Immich for organization changed everything. Now my entire life of photos is easy to search, beautifully organized, and completely private. This will live on long after I'm gone.

If you are drowning in pictures and want a simpler way to manage them, this is one of the best projects you can do. And I can help make it happen for anyone who wants their memories protected and easy to find.