Your Photos Are One Dropped Phone Away From Gone: Why Automatic Backup Matters
Phones get dropped, stolen, and soaked. Storage fills up. Accidents happen at the worst moments. And yet most people’s photo libraries live exclusively on a single device with no copy anywhere else. Until something goes wrong, this feels fine. After something goes wrong, it feels like a disaster.
Automatic mobile backup is the solution to this — and in Immich, it is built in, thoughtful, and runs quietly in the background while you get on with your life.
The Problem With “I’ll Do It Later”
Manual backups are a good intention that almost never happens consistently. You tell yourself you will back up your photos before the holiday, before the phone upgrade, before the trip. Sometimes you do. More often, you do not — and the gap between “last backup” and “right now” is where lost photos live.
The only backup strategy that reliably works is one that does not require you to remember anything. That means automatic backup: every new photo or video your phone takes gets uploaded to your server without any action on your part.
This is exactly what Immich’s mobile backup feature does.
How Automatic Backup Works in Immich
When you enable automatic backup in the Immich app, the application monitors your device’s camera roll and selected albums. Every time a new photo or video appears, it gets queued for upload to your PixelUnion server.
There are two modes:
Foreground backup runs when you have the app open. It is fast and useful for initial setup, when you are moving a large existing library across for the first time.
Background backup runs silently while you use other apps or even while your phone sits on the charger. This is the mode that makes backup truly automatic — you do not need to open Immich for your photos to be safe.
Both modes work together. The app uploads what it can in the background and catches up when you open it.
Selective Album Backup
Not everyone wants their entire camera roll backed up. Immich lets you choose which albums or folders from your phone are included. You might, for example, include your Camera album but exclude screenshots, or back up only specific folders from your downloads.
This selective approach means you stay in control of what ends up on your server without giving up the convenience of automation.
No Duplicates, Ever
One of the small but important details Immich gets right: it tracks which photos have already been uploaded. If you open the app on multiple devices, or if a photo somehow gets added to the queue twice, Immich will not create a second copy. Your library stays clean.
Everything Comes With the Photo
Automatic backup is not just file copying. Immich preserves all of the metadata that comes with your photos: the GPS coordinates of where the shot was taken, the timestamp, the camera model, the exposure settings. When you browse by map or search by location later, all of that information is there because it was captured at the point of backup.
Live Photos from iPhone and Motion Photos from Android are preserved too, not flattened into static images.
Your Backup, Your Server, Your Rules
There is an important distinction between backup solutions. With Google Photos or iCloud, your photos are backed up to someone else’s infrastructure, subject to their terms of service, their pricing, and their legal jurisdiction. The US CLOUD Act, for example, allows American authorities to compel US tech companies to hand over data stored anywhere in the world — including data belonging to Europeans stored on European data centers run by US companies.
With PixelUnion, your backup goes to a server running in Europe, operated under European law, by a company whose only business model is providing you storage. There is no ad revenue to optimise for, no AI model to train on your family photos, no surveillance infrastructure in the background.
Automatic backup should be both effortless and trustworthy. At PixelUnion, it is both.
Getting Started
Download the Immich app for iOS or Android and connect it to your PixelUnion server. Open Settings → Backup, enable automatic backup, select which albums to include, and you are done. The rest happens automatically.
If you do not yet have a PixelUnion account, you can start one at pixelunion.eu. Your memories deserve a home that will still be there tomorrow.