Hello Everyone,
I’ve just set up my UGREEN NAS and one of the main reasons I bought it was to keep all of our family photos in one place.
I’ve seen lots of people recommending Immich, but the built-in Photos app also looks quite nice and seems much easier to set up.
For those who have tried both, which one do you actually use day to day? Is Immich worth the extra effort, or is the native Photos app good enough for most families?
I mainly want automatic phone backups, easy browsing, and a simple way to share albums with my family.
I’d love to hear what you ended up choosing and why.
I went with Immich, although I only tried the built in app a couple of years ago, but it was pretty meh back then.
Admittedly Immich wasn’t great at the same point in time, but since release 2.0 and even more so since 3.0, it’s gotten really good. I started at 2.0, as I didn’t want to migrate the database from 1.x.
One advantage with Immich is that you don’t get locked into the vendor app and can move to different hardware later and export your library and all the data and bring it to the new device.
Another advantage is that you can set up a reverse proxy and easily share images, assuming you’re not behind GCNAT and have access to a DDNS service.
You can also add this to protect your Immich library further.
If you feel adventurous, there’s also this.
Easiest way to install Immich is as a project or alternatively you install Portainer first and install it as a stack through Portainer. Either which way, you can update all four containers at once if you do it that way, which means nothing is likely to break during updates. I’m about nine months in and haven’t had any issues with anything breaking, the only slight niggle is that very rarely, some thumbnails don’t load and even more rarely, the odd picture doesn’t load.
I’m with Immich not because the Ugreen app is bad but because I want an independent app that also works as phone gallery
| Feature | Built-in UGOS Photos | Immich (Docker) |
|---|---|---|
| Setup Complexity |  Plug-and-Play: Pre-installed on UGOS Pro, zero config needed. |
 Moderate: Requires Docker Compose / Portainer setup. |
| Mobile App Sync | Built into the native UGREEN NAS mobile app. |
Dedicated Immich iOS/Android app with fast background sync. |
| AI & Face Recognition | Basic face and scene indexing handled on the NAS CPU. |
 Advanced: High-accuracy face detection, semantic search (CLIP), and smart object search. |
| Data Mobility |  Locked into UGOS ecosystem & folder structure. |
Open-source PostgreSQL database; easy to export anywhere. |
| External Sharing | Relies on UGREEN Link / UGOS user accounts. |
Granular share links, partner sharing, and public proxies. |
| Resource Usage | Lightweight and pre-integrated. |
Higher RAM/CPU usage (especially during AI face indexing). |