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

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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!

Hello everyone, it is my pleasure to deliver the new release of Immich to you. The team has been working hard to bring you the new features and improvements. This release includes some big features that the community has been asking since the beginning of Immich. We hope you will enjoy it.

Some notable features are:

• OAuth integration
• LivePhoto support on iOS
• User config system