Immich 3.0 is finally a Google Photos replacement you can hand to your family

Self-hosted photo libraries have always had the same problem: they're great for the person who set them up and baffling for everyone else in the house. Immich v3.0.0, released July 1, 2026 and the project's first-ever major version bump, is the release that closes most of that gap — real photo editing on mobile, automation you configure by dragging boxes around, and video that just plays without waiting for a transcode.

What actually landed

Workflows is the headline: a visual builder that chains triggers to filters to actions, so you can automate library housekeeping without touching a config file. The mobile app gained a proper non-destructive photo editor on both iOS and Android — crop, rotate and adjust, with the original file left untouched — which finally brings it to parity with the web interface. Real-time HLS transcoding (also in preview) means videos stream without pre-generating offline transcodes. There's also mobile OCR, a slideshow, Android default-gallery-app integration, and a 'Recently added' view sorted by upload date rather than capture date — a small thing that matters enormously when you've just bulk-imported a decade of photos.

Integrity checks are the underrated addition

The new integrity checking scans for untracked files, missing assets and checksum mismatches. For anyone who has migrated a photo library between systems — which is most self-hosters — this is the feature that tells you whether the migration actually worked, instead of finding a hole in your 2019 photos three years later. Unglamorous, and arguably the most valuable thing in the release.

Read this before you upgrade

This is a major version bump for a reason. Immich dropped support for the pgvecto.rs vector database, removed the /api/server/theme endpoint, switched duration fields to milliseconds, restructured error responses, and removed deprecated environment variables. The project's own position is that most of this breakage lands on third-party tools rather than end users — but if you're running an older machine-learning configuration on pgvecto.rs, that's the one that will stop your upgrade cold. Check your vector database backend before you pull the new image, and take a backup you have actually tested restoring.

Immich has been 'nearly there' as a Google Photos replacement for a couple of years. With mobile editing, automation and integrity checking in place, 3.0 is the first version where handing it to a non-technical family member doesn't feel like an imposition. Just do the upgrade carefully — the breaking changes are real, even if they mostly hit tooling rather than people.