The team behind Immich, a popular open-source, self-hosted photo and video management platform, has released version 2.2, just one month after achieving stable status.
One of the most requested features from the community has finally landed — Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Users can now search for text inside images, enabling quick retrieval of items such as handwritten notes, documents, recipes, or other text-containing visuals.
The OCR system is tightly integrated with Immich’s existing machine-learning pipeline and runs automatically for new uploads. For existing galleries, administrators can trigger OCR processing by navigating to Administration > Job > All > OCR.
The feature officially supports English, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, and Japanese, while languages using Latin scripts generally work with varying accuracy. On the web app, users can now select “Text” as a search type via a new radio button, and this functionality is also available as a dropdown option in the mobile app.
Another notable feature is that Immich 2.2 introduces a WebAssembly implementation for performing justified layout calculations. This change significantly improves thumbnail rendering speed, especially when browsing large collections containing tens of thousands of assets.
Additionally, the release enhances the duplicate review screen, displaying more contextual details, including date, location, and the number of albums to which an asset belongs.
On the mobile side, the Immich app gains multiple enhancements. More specifically, the asset detail view now lists the albums to which an image belongs, allowing for direct navigation. The popular “Show Similar Photos” feature, already available on the web, is now part of the mobile experience.
Albums also feature a new chat-style activity view. Additionally, the built-in video player now supports high-precision seeking.
To reduce distractions, this update redesigned the mobile app’s handling of server-client version mismatches. Instead of intrusive pop-ups, the app now displays subtle update prompts with direct links to release notes or the App Store.
Regarding user management, administrators can now create new users directly as admins. On the backend, the update adds support for configuring SMTPS transport, enhanced metadata reading for video files, and the ability to generate database dumps compatible with PostgreSQL 18.
Finally, on the bug fixes side, Immich 2.2 resolves issues where older iOS devices could freeze during background tasks and ensures temporary files are properly cleaned up after uploads. Numerous UI and navigation refinements across platforms further improve consistency and responsiveness.
For more information, see the changelog.
