Immich is the best alternative open-source tool to Google Photos. It moves fast. If you are running it in your homelab, you may see update notifications almost every month. Version 3.2.0 and then immediately 3.2.1 as a bug-fix patch are among the notable updates seen recently. It is like Google Photos — easy to search with queries and impressive in how it recognizes faces across different user accounts.
If you share your Immich instance with a partner or family members, this update brings a feature you have likely been waiting for. Let's break down exactly what changed in the latest September 2026 update and what the self-hosting community is still begging for.
Search API v2: The Foundation for Better Filtering
The visual design of the web UI has been improved, making the search modal easier to navigate and less cluttered. Still, the heavy lifting happened on the backend. Immich has completely rebuilt the search API from the ground up.
Why does this matter? When you have 100,000 photos, searching with basic keywords gets frustrating fast. The new v2 API finally supports searching within specific albums and, more importantly, it introduces boolean AND / OR logic.
Right now, a lot of this power is just exposed at the API level. If you look at the endpoint (Immich API Documentation), you can see options for complex queries. But while this option is not yet available in the UI, the groundwork is laid. Third-party tools can already take advantage of it, and you can expect the native web and mobile apps to inherit these advanced filters soon.
Cluster Groups: The Holy Grail of Partner Sharing
Photo sharing between partners is often the biggest hurdle when it comes to Google Photos alternatives. Immich 3.2 introduces "Cluster Groups" to solve this.
Now you can invite trusted users on your server into a group and the machine learning model will pool everyone's faces together. If your partner takes a picture of your kid and it shows up in your shared timeline, Immich will know it's the same kid you have already tagged in your own library. Pooling the data also means the ML model gets more angles and lighting conditions to work with, making the facial recognition noticeably more accurate across the board. But there is a massive catch.
Because of data structure changes, you need to completely reset the facial recognition data for everyone in the group to turn this on. That means all your manually assigned names and birthdates will be wiped. You will have to retag your people from scratch. This process is painful and tedious. The developers noted that non-destructive merging just wasn't ready yet, so starting fresh is the only way to get the clustered data working properly.
Tagging Workflows and UI Tweaks
If you enjoy automating your digital life, the new workflow triggers will be perfect for you. Immich added an "Asset Tagged" trigger. You can set filters to look for specific tags—matching all, any, or none from the provided list—and then initiate actions, such as automatically adding a secondary list of tags to those photos. Also, you can finally rename existing tags directly within the web UI.
We also got a dedicated Memories page. Instead of just seeing ephemeral "On this day" popups that vanish tomorrow, you can browse a permanent page of past memories and favorite the ones you want to keep around forever.
On the map view, there is a new button that opens a dynamic timeline of any assets currently visible within your map viewport. If you zoom out or pan to a different city, the side photo timeline updates in real-time to match the geography.
For the folks deploying from scratch, the team also released an official Docker Compose builder tool on their site. It makes generating a custom docker-compose.yml for your specific hardware, database, and storage paths a lot less prone to YAML indentation errors.
The 3.2.1 Cleanup
When 3.2.0 released, it broke a few things. Version 3.2.1 dropped a few days later to clean up the mess.
It fixed a major issue where partner images were not displaying correctly on the People page, and resolved a bug where archived photos remained in the main timeline. Developers also brought back the button for finding untagged images. For the database nerds, version 3.2.1 automatically runs a vacuum and re-indexes PostgreSQL after migrations, keeping performance snappy and fixing weird search anomalies.
The Elephant in the Room: Nested Albums
Read any forum thread or Reddit post about Immich, and within three comments, someone will ask about nested albums.
If you absolutely need advanced sharing features and nested structures right now, some folks in the community are starting to point toward the Noodle Gallery fork of Immich. Alternatively, if managing database migrations, encryption keys, and ripping off facial recognition band-aids is stressing you out, paid managed services like Pixelunion are gaining traction for users who just want it to work.
Despite the drama over folders, Immich is still the reigning champion for homelab photo management. Ripping off the facial recognition band-aid for Cluster Groups is going to annoy a lot of users this weekend, but the underlying architectural improvements in 3.2 prove the team is building this platform to scale long-term.
