Leave a photo subscription without losing your library

The bill arrives, the tier is full again, and you do the arithmetic: this is rent, forever, on photographs you already took. So you look at moving the library somewhere you own.

It is very doable. It is also the kind of project where the exciting part — picking the software — is the least important, and the boring part decides whether you keep your photos.

Get the files out first, before choosing anything

Export before you evaluate. Until you have the archive on a disk you can hold, you do not have a migration, you have a plan.

Both big providers have a bulk export. Ask for the whole library, expect it in multiple large archives, and expect it to take a while.

Then, before deleting anything anywhere, check three things:

1. The count. Does the number of files roughly match what the service claimed you had? Order-of-magnitude, not exact — exports handle duplicates and edits differently.
2. The videos. They are the biggest files and the most likely to be quietly truncated or skipped.
3. The edits. If you cropped or filtered a photo years ago, decide whether you expect the original, the edited version, or both. Exports vary, and some give you both as separate files with confusingly similar names.

The metadata trap

This is the part that ruins migrations, and it is worth understanding before you import anything.

A photo's date, location and description usually live inside the file, in EXIF. But large exports frequently ship that information beside the photo instead, in a sidecar JSON file per image, because the service kept some of it in its own database rather than in the file.

Import the folder naively into new software and you get a library where everything is dated the day you downloaded it, sorted into one enormous 2026 pile, with no locations. The photos are all there. The twenty years of order is gone.

So: check for sidecar files before importing. If they are there, use a tool that reads them and writes the values back into the images — this is what people mean by "merging the JSON" in migration guides. Do it once, on a copy, and verify a handful of known photos have the right dates before you trust the whole run.

Test with a small folder first. A hundred photos will teach you what a hundred thousand would, in four minutes instead of two days.

Where to put it

Immich is the first self-hosted photo app that does not feel like a downgrade. Phone auto-backup, face and object search, shared albums, a timeline that scrubs smoothly through a large library. The things that made the subscription pleasant are mostly here.

Be honest about what it needs: a machine that stays on. A spare mini PC, a NAS, an old desktop in a cupboard. If your answer is "my laptop", this project will disappoint you — auto-backup from a phone needs something always reachable.

The real cost is the sysadmin role. Releases move quickly, so read the upgrade notes rather than updating blind, and know where the database backup lives before you need it.

The backup maths, which is the whole thing

Your subscription was quietly doing something you are about to stop paying for: keeping copies in more than one building.

A single drive at home is not a backup, it is a single point of failure with your photographs on it. Drives die, and they die without warning. So:

• Three copies of anything you cannot re-create.
• Two different kinds of storage.
• One somewhere else entirely — another building, or encrypted cloud storage. Cheap object storage for a compressed archive costs a fraction of a photo subscription and does not need to be fast, because you will hopefully never read from it.

An external drive at a relative's house, swapped when you visit, is a legitimate offsite copy.

Then, and only then, cancel

Keep paying for one more month after everything works. Run one real restore test: pick a photo from 2016, recover it from your backup, confirm it opens with the right date. Untested backups fail at exactly the wrong moment.

Then cancel, and let the service delete on its own schedule.

The honest recommendation

If you enjoy running a small server, this is a good trade: better search than you had, no monthly bill, and your library on your own disk.

If you do not, stay subscribed. A photo library maintained by someone who resents maintaining it is more fragile than a rented one, and "I'll sort the backups out later" is how people lose baby photos. Paying someone to be responsible is a perfectly rational purchase.