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Requirements

Hardware and software requirements for Immich:

Software​

note

Immich requires the command docker compose - the similarly named docker-compose is deprecated and is no longer compatible with Immich.

Hardware​

  • OS: Recommended Linux operating system (Ubuntu, Debian, etc).
  • RAM: Minimum 4GB, recommended 6GB.
  • CPU: Minimum 2 cores, recommended 4 cores.
  • Storage: Recommended Unix-compatible filesystem (EXT4, ZFS, APFS, etc.) with support for user/group ownership and permissions.
    • The generation of thumbnails and transcoded video can increase the size of the photo library by 10-20% on average.
tip

Good performance and a stable connection to the Postgres database is critical to a smooth Immich experience. The Postgres database files are typically between 1-3 GB in size. For this reason, the Postgres database (DB_DATA_LOCATION) should ideally use local SSD storage, and never a network share of any kind. Additionally, if Docker resource limits are used, the Postgres database requires at least 2GB of RAM. Windows users may run into issues with non-Unix-compatible filesystems, see below for more details.

Special requirements for Windows users​

Database storage on Windows systems

The Immich Postgres database (DB_DATA_LOCATION) must be located on a filesystem that supports user/group ownership and permissions (EXT2/3/4, ZFS, APFS, BTRFS, XFS, etc.). It will not work on any filesystem formatted in NTFS or ex/FAT/32. It will not work in WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) when using a mounted host directory (commonly under /mnt). If this is an issue, you can change the bind mount to a Docker volume instead as follows:

Make the following change to .env:

- DB_DATA_LOCATION=./postgres
+ DB_DATA_LOCATION=pgdata

Add the following line to the bottom of docker-compose.yml:

volumes:
  model-cache:
+ pgdata: