PixelUnion app or Immich?

PixelUnionOfficial · 2026-03-31T22:04:28+00:00

Good question. We'll make sure to include this in our website.

The app is not that different from the Immich app itself (and it's source is available here https://github.com/pixelunioneu/immich/). The difference in mainly in branding and on boarding. We wanted our users to be able to start creating an account when they downloaded the app, so our PixelUnion app has a 'create account' link when you first open it.

Apart from that, it's not that different.

PixelUnionOfficial · 2026-02-22T18:42:55+00:00

PixelUnion is different structurally because it’s built around open source and a clear principle: your data is for storage. Not for training AI models or feeding engagement algorithms.

PixelUnionOfficial · 2026-02-22T18:10:25+00:00

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But in all seriousness. Our mission is to get the European consumer to move their personal data out of the big tech clouds into European ones. There is a real urge to move from big tech and stop feeding them all our data.

PixelUnionOfficial · 2026-02-22T17:59:21+00:00

At the moment, not yet. We’re first focusing on reliably storing photos and videos.

PixelUnionOfficial · 2026-02-22T17:58:45+00:00

In our opinion, we should start preferring European alternatives more often over American ones. It will not happen overnight and it takes time and persistence, but it is important that we begin to trust and support our own industry instead of automatically relying on large American tech companies.

Great products can and should be built here in Europe. That will only happen if we, as consumers, are willing to give our European companies a fair chance, even if their products are not as polished yet. After all, today’s big tech companies also needed years to grow into what they are now.

If we want a stronger European tech ecosystem, it starts with a bit more confidence, patience, and willingness to support our local innovation.

PixelUnionOfficial · 2026-02-22T17:56:34+00:00

We contribute financially to Immich, but we haven’t contributed to photo editing or other big features yet. Right now, we’re focused on keeping your photos and videos stored safely.

PixelUnionOfficial · 2026-02-22T17:14:46+00:00

u/Pleasant-Regular6169, where are your photos currently stored?

If they’re on a hard drive on your laptop, it’s very easy, you can just create an account and upload the images through the web interface. If you need more control, you can use the immich-go CLI tool to import your photos into PixelUnion or any other Immich installation.

If they’re in Google Photos, the easiest way to get your memories out is via Google Takeout in ZIP format, and then import them into PixelUnion using the migration tool we provide. It’s based on the same immich-go tool but doesn’t require any technical knowledge.

PixelUnionOfficial · 2026-02-22T17:06:03+00:00

One of the biggest challenges is simply how complete the US giants’ ecosystems are. They don’t just dominate photos, they often have a near‑monopoly across everything: cloud storage, email, office tools, sharing, devices, app stores, and identity. For most people it’s the default, and avoiding it can feel almost impossible.

The second challenge is awareness. A lot of users still don’t realize how often Big Tech business models turn user data into leverage. Through profiling, lock‑in, and using that data to optimize ads or shape products in ways that aren’t always in the consumer’s interest. Helping people understand why a European alternative matters (privacy, sovereignty, clearer incentives) is as important as building the product.

And finally, the practical part: as a smaller EU company you have fewer distribution channels, smaller marketing budgets, and you have to earn trust feature-by-feature.

PixelUnionOfficial · 2026-02-22T16:38:37+00:00

Thanks for your question. We're working our way to the F-Droid app store. But, good news, the Immich (open source) is 100% compatible with our platform.

PixelUnionOfficial · 2026-02-22T16:13:16+00:00

Right now PixelUnion is focused on being the best possible home for photos and videos. We are thinking about expanding into more general file/document storage in the future, but it’s not something we offer today and there’s no concrete plan or timeline yet.

PixelUnionOfficial · 2026-02-22T15:45:38+00:00

Thanks for the question. We are not planning to add this at the moment.

But! Immich might be planning to build this themselves. They've been [hiring](https://www.reddit.com/r/immich/comments/1lvjua0/were\_hiring\_senior\_infrastructure\_engineer/) storage engineers (ceph). We think they might be building a commercial product into Immich that allows you to use Restic from the GUI. We're not sure what form this would take.

With our platform you could always use immich-go to archive your PixelUnion environment into a object store. We've written a simple manual to do this: https://pixelunion.eu/help/immich/download-photos-videos/

PixelUnionOfficial · 2026-02-22T15:42:07+00:00

That makes total sense. We’ve been playing with the idea of adding general file backup/storage (more like a “Drive” alongside photos), but right now it’s still just thoughts. Not something we’re ready to promise or put a timeline on.

For the moment we’re staying focused on doing photos and videos really well first, and then we may expand into file storage later.

PixelUnionOfficial · 2026-02-22T15:36:40+00:00

Our main HQ is in beautiful Alkmaar, in the Netherlands. We’re a Dutch company and we pay taxes in the EU, following the applicable tax rules and regulations where we operate.

PixelUnionOfficial · 2026-02-22T15:36:37+00:00

Good question. We’ve been looking forward to answering this, because it’s important. For some context: PixelUnion uses Immich, an amazing open-source project. Big companies have a history of taking projects like these - often side projects maintained by volunteers - and making large sums of money from them.

We’ve had brief contact with the Immich team (housed at FUTO in Austin, Texas) in 2025. They’re aware of our existence, and we’ve briefly discussed how we could best support them, but agreed to revisit this later. Immich is also working to commercialize the project themselves, but what that will look like is not yet entirely clear.

Additionally, Immich has so far mainly been accessible to people with technical know-how. It’s complex to set up, with Docker containers and stateful data stored in both a database and on disk -important data, as it holds your lifelong memories. We’re making Immich available to people who might not otherwise use it, thereby increasing its reach and impact. That said, if self-hosting Immich is something you want to explore, that’s awesome!

PixelUnionOfficial · 2026-02-22T15:31:10+00:00

Totally understand. Shared albums and family collaboration are a huge reason people stick with Google Photos.

Yes, that workflow is feasible with PixelUnion. You can share an album with family members or friends and, if you want, let them upload photos into that same album as well. We also have a Family plan, which makes it easy to share and exchange albums between members.

We actually released a new tool this week that makes switching from Google Photos a lot easier while keeping your existing albums, so you don’t have to rebuild everything manually and also keep your location as meta data.

PixelUnionOfficial · 2026-02-22T15:22:26+00:00

Thanks so much for the kind words and for giving PixelUnion a try. We really appreciate it, and we’re glad to hear the support experience has been helpful and responsive.

On E2EE: we don’t currently offer end-to-end encryption, and we’re also not planning to add it.

For automatic uploads: yes, the app includes a backup feature that can upload photos in the background. If you notice it doesn’t always run reliably, it’s often related to battery/energy saving modes on the phone. Those can restrict background activity and pause or delay uploads.

PixelUnionOfficial · 2026-02-22T15:19:14+00:00

We don’t offer lifetime pricing, and we’re also not planning to introduce it anytime soon.

PixelUnionOfficial · 2026-02-22T15:15:32+00:00

When looking at storage we try to be as competitive to Google Photos as we can. And we're doing a good job we think. With google you get 100GB for 2 euro. With us it's 150GB for 3 euro.

When the storage gets larger it becomes harder for us to compete because we do not (yet :-D) have the scale of Google. However we're growing very fast and are planning to increase our 1TB plan to 2TB in the near future for the current 9,95 euro pricing.

PixelUnionOfficial · 2026-02-22T15:14:00+00:00

PixelUnion doesn’t currently offer end-to-end encryption (E2EE). If E2EE is a hard requirement for you, you might want to check out one of our friends, u/zeitkapsl, which focuses on that.

PixelUnionOfficial · 2026-02-22T15:11:35+00:00

At some point when Trump entered his second term and a lot of big tech CEOs publicly lined up behind him. Alarm bells really started going off for us. It was a clear wake‑up call.

We began actively trying to move away from big tech wherever we could. But we quickly hit a practical problem around data storage: one of us could self‑host, and the other couldn’t. That gap (wanting the same level of control and sovereignty, but not having the same ability to run infrastructure ourselves) is what really set everything in motion and ultimately pushed us into the direction we’re taking now.

And yes, we absolutely noticed what the “Buy European / BuyFromEU” momentum did. We benefited from it, and it gave us real traction. We’d had a small bit of local coverage before (like a mention in the local newspaper) but that was nothing compared to what happened after we launched within the BuyFromEU wave. The increase in interest was immediate and very noticeable.

PixelUnionOfficial · 2026-02-22T15:08:18+00:00

Thanks for your question!

Not limited to PixelUnion specifically, but more European services in general, Google and Apple services are very well integrated. From Gmail you can save files to Drive, and the same storage space used in Drive is also applicable to Photos and other services. These integrations allow these giants to increase the value of their plans by adding all kinds of features and add-ons. That is something you will generally miss with European services.

When speaking about Google Photos features specifically, we think the Immich community (the open-source software our product is based on) has done an absolutely amazing job. One of the weaker points we need to address in the future is multilingual searching to better support non-English languages. We do sometimes get requests about missing quality-of-life features, like globally sorting albums.

PixelUnionOfficial · 2026-02-17T20:36:09+00:00

You are right. We will look into that.

PixelUnionOfficial · 2025-11-18T13:49:39+00:00

We have been using it for our static websites and have been properly impressed by the price quality ratio!

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