I have a very very large iPhone photo library that spans well over a decade. So I do expect the first backup/upload from my iPhone photo library to immich to take a long time, but it has been over a week and so far only around 5,000 photos/videos have been backed up out of around 110,000.

I believe that when I do not have immich “open” in the foreground, it is no longer uploading or backing up.
I’ve tried opening the app before bed when I plug my phone in, but eventually it locks and stops the process. Is it normal to only upload when immich is open? Any tips to make this process faster?

I’ve included stats so far and what I thought were my relevant settings and a log screenshot. But let me know if any other info would be relevant to help solve this issue. Thanks

Hi all

Google photos has finally gone. I've taken all my photos from it using Google Takeout and they're stored on my hard drive waiting to be uploaded.

I've currently backed up my iPhone so all those folders are now uploaded and facial recognition has now start, maps shows where I've been and so far it's been quite pleasant.

I'm now worrying about uploading my Google photos and backups.

I am using a online server and everything is up and running, I have a windows 11 pc running non stop that I will setup that has a 10tb drive in it which I will use for backups so if the remote server fails, I still have the drive.

I have a couple of Questions I am hoping you lovely people can answer.

1. What is the beltway to backup?
   I understand I need to backup the database and the photos and that anything I change inside Immich will be in the database so dates, times, locations etc are not attached to the photo (just like google photos). Is this correct? Can it backup like Google Takeout and give you json files so you can connect them again without the need for the database? I'm just thinking ahead and I might not get on with Immich and I decided to go down another route.

2. Google Takeout
   I have about 30 folders, 50gig each with multiple json files.
   I am assuming most of the later photos should have location, date and time etc. most are backed up from my iPhone. The rest will be old family photos which have been digitised many moons ago. these are terrible for dates etc so my plan is to work out the correct dates, locations etc as and when I get time. Could maybe the photos with no date or location be put into a folder so I can work through those at a later date?

How do I even start with google photos? I see so many different ways of doing this, some old, some new so I thought I would ask in October 26 to see what's the best way for me.

Thanks

I’ve been using Immich for several months now without any issues.

Besides backing up my Pixel 8, I’ve also added a few external libraries.

Now I’m having a problem that started around the time these two things happened:

• I updated to 3.3.3.
• During the update attempt, my VM ran out of disk space. I shut it down, expanded the disk, booted it back up, and got everything running again.

I’m not sure which of those triggered it, but I’m now seeing the following issues in the web interface:

• All newly uploaded photos from my phone have broken thumbnails.
• Yesterday, I ran the thumbnail generation job for ALL assets. That fixed the existing photo thumbnails, but any photos uploaded afterward have the same problem again.
• Recent videos also have broken thumbnails, but rerunning the thumbnail generation job doesn’t fix those.

Any suggestions on how to troubleshoot this or check whether something got stuck or didn’t recover properly?

I recently setup a new Ugreen DXP4800 Plus.

I'm following Marius's blog post to setup up Immich on this NAS with GPU acceleration. The NAS is set up with the following volumes:

• Volume 1: RAID-1 Dual HDD
  • I have multiple shared folders here (Photos, Videos, Music, etc.)
• Volume 2: RAID-0 Single HDD
• Volume 3: SSD (for Docker containers)
  • This is where I'm hosting all the docker containers.

I'm attempting to setup the immich Docker container to run on volume3 (SSD). As per this documentation, I've updated the environment variables and the docker composer yaml for

• UPLOAD_LOCATION & BACKUP_LOCATION on volume1 (HDD)
• THUMB_LOCATION, ENCODED_VIDEO_LOCATION & PROFILE_LOCATION on volume3 (SSD)

When I deploy the container, it created the following directories on both volumes. Volume1 (HDD on the left) and volume3 (SSD on the right where docker container are deployed).

It's interesting that on volume1 (HDD on the left), it created the profile, thumbs, and encoded-video folders as well.

The immrich container fails to start since it couldn't create /data/encoded-video/.immich. But it create the encoded-video folder there.

2026-10-18T02:20:40.778732057Z [Immich-SERVER-GPU] [Nest] 7  - 10/17/2026, 10:20:40 PM   ERROR [Microservices:StorageService] Failed to create /data/encoded-video/.immich: Error: EACCES: permission denied, open '/data/encoded-video/.immich'
2026-10-18T02:20:40.783620030Z [Immich-SERVER-GPU] microservices worker error: Error: Failed to create "<UPLOAD_LOCATION>/encoded-video/.immich - Please see https://docs.immich.app/administration/system-integrity#folder-checks for more information.", stack: Error: Failed to create "<UPLOAD_LOCATION>/encoded-video/.immich - Please see https://docs.immich.app/administration/system-integrity#folder-checks for more information."

How do I fix this?

If anyone has modded an Frameo Frame with Immich Frame recently, can you please post the details of the equipment you used and which frame.

I’m trying to load it on this one link to Frame

I’ve tried almost everything. Only thing not tried is usb a to usb a because I don’t have any devices that have a usb a port.

I'm currently looking to run Immich as a photo repository for my family. The promise of Immich face-sharing caused me to take the plunge and spin up a server. It's been working great, even if just for me, but I want to start taking steps to make it available to family now that 3.3.0 has been released.

I'm hoping someone who has done something similar could share their experience so I can minimize my trial and error.

I currently have a "Scanned Photos" folder and in it there are four directories for each branch of our family (mom and dad sides for both my wife and I). Currently, those four folders are synced with google drive and I share the respective folders with the various sides of the family. They can browse, but don't have any robust searching available to them.

Each directory has sub directories based on if the photos came from a random catch-all box, or if they were from a specific set (such as a wedding photo album), so using the photo structure is key to me.

Short version of what I want:

• Four specific logins for each branch of the family with access to photos based on folder structure
• No way for users to edit tagged faces or names since they'll be shared.
• Only allow them to browse faces that are in the assets shared with them.
• Nested albums
• Automatically associated new photos with the shared asset if they're added into the folder.

I know asset sharing with folders and nested albums aren't supported directly, so I'm looking at using some sort of external too (Savloxia maybe?), but I'd like to minimize chances of the workflow breaking during updates or chasing my tail

My current setup:

• Synology NAS with \\NAS\Pictures shared: (135,000 files / 950 GB)
• Ubuntu Server with the above directory mounted
• Portainer with Immich stack. Sub directories listed as read-only assets in my stack YAML.
• Immich scans and processes new photos at 2am

Hello all! I’ve been an Immich user for a few years now and I’ve run into an interesting issue.

About 2 weeks ago my lxc instance stopped when the disk hit 100%. I decided to mount it and remove the “encoded-videos” directory entirely to free up some room so I could at least get into the container and add more storage (and create a backup).

For some reason, the section of photos and videos between September 2025 - December 2025 are corrupted. They cannot load in from the server, the thumbnails show, but the videos and photos will never load. I’ve tried to figure it out? But in maintenance mode it says that I have 20K corrupt files and I can’t figure out a way to fix them.

They still exist in iCloud, should I remove them on Immich and let iCloud re-sync them??

Thanks again for any helpful suggestions!

As tailscale tends to use a lot of battery life I found a solution I wanted to share that's worked for my wife and I for a week or so.

How do I make my entire gallery offline accessible? if not, is it possible to easily make albums offline? Currently there is no select all button in the album and I have to select each photo manually

So I'm no professional photographer but I DO have a fancy camera that can make a bunch of images. Especially of kids running/sports events I have a bunch of images that are sort-of-the-same-but-not-exactly. Out of these types of photos I want to select the best.

In Immich I currently do this by just going through them 1 by 1: delete the ugly ones. Go back to the beginning & repeat until I have an acceptable amount of images left. I've had several times when 1 of the "ugly" images ended up being one of the best ones: Which means a deep sigh, go to trash to recover the image again.

I have no clue how professional photographers do this. But Ideally I'd like a tool or method where I can group images, give them a grade & only select the top 3 out of those. Or something like that...

Does anyone have any tips to approach this problem within Immich systematically? Any tools/plugins that can help?

Hey everyone!

I’m planning to run Immich on my M1 MacBook Air (16GB RAM, Docker Desktop) and wanted to check if my intended setup would work.

I’d like to keep recent photos on the Mac’s internal SSD and move older originals to a 2TB external HDD using an External Library.

My main requirement is a Google Photos-like experience:
- Browse the entire timeline, including older photos, even when the HDD is disconnected.
- Keep thumbnails visible and use Smart Search to find older photos.
- If I open an archived photo, it’s okay if Immich tells me to reconnect the HDD to access the original.
Once reconnected, the original should become accessible again without reimporting everything.

Is this workflow supported? Specifically, does Smart Search continue working for external-library assets when their original files are offline?

Has anyone implemented or tested this successfully?

I selected hundreds of photo in my immich app album (containing photos uploaded by me and my spouse) , and clicked on download. I realise it started appearing under today's date photos which is wrong!

Hello everyone. I have a question about Immich versions.

I am very new to homelabbing and my hardware is very old. I have downloaded Immich from CasaOS and it came with version v.2.7.2. Immich says version 3.3.3 is available. Would updating Immich to this version have any disadvantages for me? Thanks in advance.

Here is my hardware:

=== CPU ===

Model name: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU L 640 @ 2.13GHz

Thread(s) per core: 2

Core(s) per socket: 2

Socket(s): 1

=== MOTHERBOARD ===

Manufacturer: INTEL

Product Name: INTEL H55

Version: INTEL

=== RAM ===

total used free shared buff/cache available

Mem: 3.1Gi 2.1Gi 91Mi 67Mi 1.2Gi 1.0Gi

Swap: 7.2Gi 1.5Gi 5.7Gi

Maximum Memory Module Size: 4096 MB

Maximum Total Memory Size: 16384 MB

Current Speed: Unknown

Type: DIMM SDRAM

Installed Size: 4096 MB (Double-bank Connection)

Enabled Size: 4096 MB (Double-bank Connection)

Current Speed: Unknown

Type: DIMM SDRAM

Installed Size: Not Installed

Enabled Size: Not Installed

Current Speed: Unknown

Type: DIMM SDRAM

Installed Size: Not Installed

Enabled Size: Not Installed

Current Speed: Unknown

Type: DIMM SDRAM

Installed Size: Not Installed

Enabled Size: Not Installed

Error Correction Type: None

Size: 4 GB

Type: SDRAM

Speed: Unknown

Manufacturer: Manufacturer00

Type: Unknown

Type: Unknown

Type: Unknown

=== GPU ===

03:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Oland [Radeon HD 8570 / R5 430 OEM / R7 240/340 / Radeon 520 OEM]

Hello internet, I recently started running Immich and I am loving it. I am running it on Docker for Windows as I have to use an old laptop (resources are tight). I was able to get it up and running but space was a concern so I thought setting up an external hard drive would be an easy fix.

The problem: I cannot get Docker or Immich to see/recognize the external hard drive. I think I have to mount it but I am not sure how to do that. I did adjust the settings to file share my external hard drive.

I have tried putting /mnt/d:/immichphotos in the ENV file as the location but this just creates a folder next to the ENV file called mnt.

Any help would be appreciated. I am not super tech savvy but willing to learn. If there are guides on this or other resources please point me in that direction. My Googling has not been successful.

Hi,

I am looking for a way to import all of my (shared) albums to immich?

One way could be with the iCloud app on Windows, but this is currently not working...?

Can you recommend any way to transfer the albums?

I just want to throw some love and appreciation toward the Immich devs who do such an incredible job.

Ive been using immich for 2ish months now and I can’t believe I lived without it. Before I used immich I was backing up images to my mac which resulted in many issues including corrupting thousands of pictures. But now backups happen every time I take a photo, no matter where I am.

I’m also a wedding photographer which is why I have so much storage lol. This is my storage structure.

I recently got into self hosting with an HP EliteBook 840 G4 16GB ram, Intel Core i7-7500U running Ubuntu and docker that I got off marketplace for $90.

Sandisk SSD 1TB - entirely dedicated to immich

QNAP TR-002 wifh 2 8TB WD red plus hard drives - used for general file archiving and work storage for photography. As well as hourly Time Machine backups

WD MyBook 6TB - used for occasional backups of the qnap and sandisk.

Immich gets backed up automatically every night to my qnap.

I also use tailscale and nginx on my server which honestly doubles immich’s value to me. Whether or not im at home immich can resolve to one address https://immich.home (if you don’t use tailscale, seriously consider it)

I know I don’t have a 3-2-1 backup but im doing the best I can given my college budget and I fully intend to purchase a license once I can afford it!

First for context, I am a newb to both Docker Desktop and immich so take this with a grain of salt.
I'm just trying to figure out what happened.

Two years ago, my setup was Docker Desktop and immich installed on a headless Windows 11 Pro PC. I would remote into it for any maintenance. During the initial setup, I set the upload folder as Z: which is a mapped folder on my QNAP NAS. However from day one, I noticed there was never any files there. I assumed immich was storing the files in the C: of the Windows PC. This made sense because the SSD properties showed over 100GB of usage after my first sync.

A while back I upgraded Docker Desktop to a new version. Right away immich stopped working. The error was related to not being able to access my Z: drive (this is my network NAS drive). The NAS was moved to a different network at the time. However, I found it odd since it never stored anything on the NAS. Anyway, I put it on my to-do list since I was busy at the time.

This weekend I finally came back to troubleshoot this. Having put the NAS back on the same network and re-mapping the drive, the error is now saying "no such file or folder" etc.

I thought I would go hunt down the files to make sure they're all still there.
Based on querying the database, there should have been 22,000 images (38GB) and 7,300 videos (73GB). Here's the kicker, I can't find them anywhere. In fact there are no folders on the Windows PC that are even remotely close to 100GB. The Windows folder is 38GB and there are a couple of other folders around 14GB. Docker folder itself is 10GB.
There is also nothing on the NAS immich folder, never was. Nothing in the recycling bin.

My guess is immich never stored anything on Z: and created it's only folders within the VM (despite what the .env file specified), perhaps due to a network hiccup. When Docker upgraded, it must have thought that the files were on the Z: drive and somehow re-did the entire file system on the VM.

Currently me and my SO have Android and iOS devices both hooked up to immich. Android provides a separate album/folder for Camera photos and videos, as well as separate screenshots and a few other albums, so it's very simple to back up only Camera photos and media by selecting only the Camera album.

IOS does not seem to provide such separation and it seems to require selecting the Recents folder/album so that contains all the camera photos and videos. However, that album also contains screenshots and every photo downloaded.

What's the best way to exclude those from backing up or if it can't be achieved on the phone, is there a good workflow that auto archives such photos?

Here's the issue, i'm using Immich bare metal so some of the encoding like for hevc is not available, to make it available is very costly and no straight forward solution for this, is there any tool to detect hevc/heif file, and create the thumbnail for it? if possible it run in different server than the immich server

Hi, Any advice how to backup my Immnich server?

I plan to build a 2nd Immnich at my parents and somehow to sync the photos from my house and their house. Even geograhpically is only 5km away (so is not proof to natural disasters) should be ok

Hi, got everything running fine, locally hosted only. Backup/sync only happens when I'm connected to my home wifi and actually backing up happens smoothly.

But how do I get my photos to stay downloaded and available in the android app when I'm away from my home wifi? For example if I download an entire album of say 30 photos from multiple years ago I can view them if I turn wifi off.

The next day they same album just seems to be deleted/unsyned and I just get the placeholder thumbnail as if my phone has never had access to these images before. As soon as I rejoin my home wifi i can view that album again. What gives?

Basically what I want is to have all photos, google takeout with rebult metadata, on a) my phone , b) my immich server, c) a memory stick somewhere. But it seems to fail at the phone part. Any ideas? I'm definitely downloadign the full album to my device!

Short: What I would like from Immich is to have a single library where everyone upload their photos.

Long: I have a large video/photo family library, nearly 800gb, organized per year/date

I love Immich, but it's app uploads media in a folder separated from the library and per user.

I tried many ways to move uploaded media to the main library, only to find that the android app REUPLOAD everything if I remove it from the upload folder.

So the only viable way to have what I want is to not use the autobackup of the app, but using syncthing to upload everything on a different folder and a couple of scripts to move things in their final places.

But I don't think that having a single library is something so uncommon.

Anyone knows another simpler way to accomplish that?

Spoiler alert: It’s completely a self entertainment project I am playing with, still working on it. It would be free and open source on GitHub.