Immich 3.0

Join the discussion

• Hacker News
• Immich is an amazing software. I use it regularly as an alternative along side Google photos. I keep in it large videos that I wouldn't upload normally to Google photos + the snappy experience at home vs Cloud-Bades solution.
  by MohamedMabrouk
• I have a different bash with them than the lack of E2EE: they do not make it easy to import from other servicesvlike Google Photos or iCloud, which should be a priority.

  They rely on immich-go project, which is ridden with bugs and basically abandonware by now. Their own iOS app, which can also be used for syncing iCloud gallery, has outstanding, 2 y/o or so bugs that will fail to upload the Live Motion photos.

  My photos exported to Immigh have some 9000 broken, half imported Live Photos and I just don't have time to fix that.

  The fact that THIS is not their priority, the most comprehensively A-B tested feature is beyond me. Who cares about OCR if you can't trust that they didn't butcher your imported memories? I just don't get it!

  by cromka
• > they do not make it easy to import from other servicesvlike Google Photos or iCloud

  Because those services are closed black boxes that don't really let you access them except in a very roundabout way?

  by troupo
• The amount of entitlement on display here is astounding.
  by MrDresden
• In the same universe, I took a google takeout last week to migrate to immich, 12k photos/videos.

  I set up immich backed by ceph last week and I got everything migrated via immich-go, with all metadata albums and all.

  Had to change some parallelization option, but otherwise it was a breeze.

  by gotbeans
• > I just don't get it!

  This is open source, volunteer developers often focus on doing things that are fun to them, or that scratch their own itch. I can't imagine dealing with Google Photos semi-broken exports is fun to anybody, and you only deal with the pain of the import once, afterwards there's no itch to scratch.

  by cuu508
• Has the ios photo sync gotten better? I've got 20k photos on my phone, and last I tried it filled up the storage on my phone with the originals, and never completed the process, even after leaving my phone open, unlocked, and the immich app running in the foreground for several days, on the same local network as the server.

  I know they were working on it, but haven't kept up, I just want to know if it works better now and I should try again.

  by psadauskas
• Likely more of an IOS issue than Immich issue. Apple doesn't care for apps that make it easier to exit iCloud.
  by gunapologist99
• Sync was already fixed in the last major version, at least for us (android and iphone)
  by sva_
• Large file uploads are non-resumable. That is, if you have any videos at a decent bitrate and resolution, you need to be able to upload the whole file in a single session. iOS doesn't make this easy to do via background uploads. I uploaded everything by keeping the app open overnight.
  by eptcyka
• The release notes says:

  > On iOS, the background refresh task now runs its sync and upload work in parallel, so uploads actually start within the short time window iOS allows.

  But I don't know if that fixes your issue.

  by Mashimo
• I have synced ~9000 photos from my phone in february. That worked pretty well. I was done in about 10 hours. I don't remember whether the originals were downloaded, or whether they were deleted automatically afterwards. Felt like a smooth process though.
  by Lukas_Skywalker
• I have a largish library at about 400gb. I synced it completely using the mobile app. It took a few months (it just finished in early June) but it’ll eventually do it. I know there are other ways but I figured this was the laziest way to do it.
  by dalenw
• Does anyone have any pointers on the best way to import roughly 14 Google takeout chunks into immich?

  I've downloaded all the chunks once, only to find them corrupted due to... Their 50gb size and using a browser in theory. One also cannot seem to use wget or alternatives because of the auth / session cookies required via Google takeout.

  I've yet to even broach the aspect of importing each giant bundle into immich because I've not had success in even grabbing the takeout files correctly, but would LOVE pointers on the best way of importing the roughly 700gb into the database without it ALL going wrong.

  I've had great success with immich running in docker for the past year or so, although I have yet to upgrade to the newest version. Google photos backups have been disabled on my phone for a year or so, but I yet to haul in all of the past years.

  Also, anyone know if I can get immich to upload the photos without... Running immich once in a while? Would be great if it just automatically sent them to "my cloud".

  Great software.

  by brewtide
• Just a quick note that native windows extract is 32bit and dies on archives gt 4gb. Use 7zip or something to extract in case you happen to be using that one.
  by conception
• immich-go has what you need
  by etnoy
• Likely not the best approach:

  I had ~200GiB. I selected below 10k files at a time to upload in the web UI (selected all 2014, then 2015). It was fine. More than that many and the UI became unusable.

  External Libraries seem like a good option.

  They have also recently improved the background import in the Android app so I have heard so that might be worth a try.

  by eightys3v3n
• You can use this tool to get them into Immich, it will parse all the metadata and recreate albums as you have in GPhotos https://github.com/simulot/immich-go
  by altran1502
• > Also, anyone know if I can get immich to upload the photos without... Running immich once in a while? Would be great if it just automatically sent them to "my cloud".

  See the release note that this HN thread links to ;-)

  >>> Background backup improvements Background backup on Android is now significantly more reliable. Previously, the background backup on Android was limited to newly taken photos. Now, the app uses a new periodic task scheduler, which allows you to upload your entire library in the background, and it plays nicer with Android's background execution limits, properly cleans up tasks, and warns you when battery optimization and notification settings might interfere with backups.

  On iOS, the background refresh task now runs its sync and upload work in parallel, so uploads actually start within the short time window iOS allows.

  by Mashimo
• I went through the same path as you - I think I even landed up with 14 takeout files as well!

  Its a bit of a trial, but quite doable. Its likely that things have improved since I did it about 6 months ago.

  *Getting the files from takeout* I tried downloading the files onto my laptop via a browser, and then copying them over to my NAS, but quickly gave up. The best approach is to download them directly to the NAS. As you pointed out auth/cookies is an issue. There are multiple ways of solving the issue, but for me I found the best way was to use chromes dev console network view to identify the network request for each file, then right click on it and select "Copy cURL". SSH into my nas and use that command to download the file. There is a bit more info on how to do this here:

  https://trog.qgl.org/20241001/downloading-a-google-takeout-f...

  *Importing them into immich*

  Once I had all my takeout files on the nas, I used immich-go to import them: https://github.com/simulot/immich-go

  This took a bit of tweaking to get the right set of command line args that worked well for what I wanted it to do. I also found immich errored out a few times during the import. Fortunately immich-go can just pick up the import where it left of, so I kept re-running it until everything was imported.

  *Cleaning it all up* If you just want a huge flat dump of your files your probably good. In my case there were various things I wasn't quite happy about. The default handling of stacking edited images with the originals in albums wasn't what I was after. I wanted to replicate sharing of albums with immich users to match what I had in google photos. For all this kind of cleanup work, I found it quite helpful to work with an AI agent. Give it an API key for your server + the url and get it to help you write cleanup scripts.

  by luke_s
• If you can get all the images into a filesystem (on a NAS or similar server share), you can use the External Libraries feature in Immich (https://docs.immich.app/features/libraries/). This allows it to crunch through the media files via an async import job (a bit more reliable than having to directly upload via the web api).

  In my setup, I exclusively use the external libraries feature, pointed at a read-only share from my NAS mounted onto my Immich server. (The external libraries are set to resynchronize to the database every few hours). This means I can manage all my media assets myself without worrying about Immich accidentally corrupting them, and if I eventually move off Immich, I just have a single folder of media files organized by date to port around.

  The only downside is that I don't directly upload any media files directly to Immich, but that's okay. I have Syncopoli sync files from my phones (on a scheduled cadence) to an intermediary server which organizes and cleans exif data from media files before dropping it into its permanent home on my NAS share. No manual steps to get photos from my phone to my Immich instance!

  by cbrews
• There's a lot of things I spent a ton of time setting up, use once, and then never again. Tons of things that are easy to set up, and provide small benefits every day for a long time. Immich has got to be the thing that I've spent ages setting up, use extremely infrequently but the one time a year I use it I'm so happy I did. Great software.
  by phikappa
• In my case I spent it not so much time setting it up, some time upgrading with some manual work required from time to time with breaking changes (but not so often) and I use it weekly, it just works and it's wonderful.
  by darkwater
• Man, I wish my experience was as nice. I used the proxmox lxc for it and after a 2 months of organizing I had some corruption and didn't have the fortitude to get through the debugging. It might have been related to a big version migration if I remember correctly. It turned me off the stack. The upgrading wasn't as turnkey as I wanted it to be and I dont think the case is different today.

  I just want to be able to organize my folders outside of some dumb library system and immich at the time fought that as well.

  by nickthegreek
• Immich is such a no-brainer replacement for Apple Photos or Google Photos, combined with VPN like Tailscale, it's almost a drop in replacement
  by oliyoung
• Is there any side effects of leaving the phone connected to Tailscale VPN all day?
  by Panda4
• I’ve been using photoprism. Should I switch?
  by kouru225
• I only wish it would support nested albums (or albums in folders) so it could be an easy replacement for lightroom cloud as well.

  I have all of my photos organized like this: `events -> year/month - holiday -> (album_1, ...)`. and: `home town -> year -> (album_1, ...)`. Photos will be in multiple albums, and there will be edits as well. And I need to track the picked/rejected state as well (and filter on it).

  Only reason I haven't moved over to Immich yet is because I am struggling to map my photo organization onto it's way of doing things in a way that's nice. So far my attempts have been unwieldy.

  by chillfox
• Are there any side effects of leaving Immich public? I think people overestimate the risks. Just update your stuff regularly, follow simple rules, and set up something like CrowdSec. I know it's simpler to just use Tailscale and similar tools, but recently I see the trend that people don't even consider otherwise.
  by l11r
• Beware that migrating back from Immich to iCloud/Google is not something Immich cares about. There is no "download all" anywhere, best way is to go to the server and get raw files from there.

  https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/14365

  by ivanjermakov