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!

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 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

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.

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 love traveling and always return home with a bunch of photos. But looking through them on their own doesn't give me the feeling of "where exactly was this?", so I created Retrace, a companion app for Immich. It uses the GPS metadata in your photos and shows them on a map.

It has a few main uses:
- see where have you been over the years on one map
- see your photo and travel activity over the year: the timeline shows the peaks of activi
- relive a trip on the map

Pick a trip album, or drag over any period on the timeline. It works for moving around a city (though photo GPS accuracy becomes the limit there) and for big trips across different cities, all without a separate GPS tracker! It only reads from Immich and never changes anything.

There's an open demo you can try, but Retrace works MUCH better on albums with dense photo activity (and I didn't want to share my own photos for a demo xD).

Try the demo: https://immich-retrace-demo.holoskii.me

GitHub and setup instructions: https://github.com/holoskii/immich-retrace

I’d love to hear how it works with your libraries, especially longer trips or albums with lots of photos!

https://reddit.com/link/1x99k7x/video/j8f32z0jj9wh1/player

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 have a family photo archive full of scanned prints, shots from old cameras and pictures saved from messengers, so a big pile of photos without GPS.

Adding places by hand in Immich takes forever, and putting one address on a whole day goes wrong as soon as that day had two places. So I built a small companion app for it.

It's called immich-steward. It looks at the photos that have no location, suggests where they might have been taken, and writes anything to Immich only after you confirm.

The suggestions come from separate modules, and all of them show up on one map, numbered by rank:

• Time neighbors. Photos taken shortly before and after (±3 hours) that already have a location. It draws the route between them on the map, and you can exclude a camera whose clock is off. For me this is the most useful one, and it doesn't need any ML.
• GeoCLIP (optional). A neural network that guesses the area from the picture alone. Honest expectations: it works for famous, recognizable places (think Eiffel Tower, Pantheon), and it's much weaker for ordinary provincial spots, where it can be confidently wrong. I use it as a hint and a starting point, not as the answer. Weak guesses (<25 %) are hidden, and there's a gallery filter for the confident ones so you can check them one by one. It runs locally in a separate worker container, on the server CPU (about 1 s per photo and ~1 GB RAM on my 4-core i3).

I want more modules over time, so you never have to trust a single guess.

A few things that matter to me:

• Every location it writes gets a `steward/estimated` tag, so you can always tell guessed coordinates from real ones.
• It only talks to the Immich API, no direct database access. You sign in with your Immich account and see only your own library.
• Everything stays on your server.
• Review works from the keyboard. There's address search, coordinate input, and "skip" / "not applicable" marks, so a photo of a receipt doesn't sit in your to-do list forever.

Install is Docker Compose next to Immich (v3.x):

https://github.com/Ivamic/immich-steward

It's an early pre-release (0.2.x), AGPL-3.0, so please back up your library before letting it write anything. Next on my list: similarity to your own geotagged photos, your own "landmarks", and picking a region of the image for shots with a crowd in front of the thing you actually want to locate.

I know a lot of people aren't fond of AI-assisted development, so I'll say it upfront: part of the code in this project was written with Claude. It lets me move faster, and I check and test whatever it produces on my own archive.

If anyone decides to give it a try, I'd be glad to hear your feedback, especially on the install, on whether time neighbors help with your photos, and what would make the review flow faster for you.