I didn’t see any unique format for how Immich stores photos, they’re just on the filesystem as images.
Comment on recommendations for selfhosted photo backup solution: folders vs albums?
ayaya@lemdro.id 9 months agoI wanted to try Immich but I quickly found out you can’t simply point it at an existing folder structure like say Plex or Jellyfin. You have to “import” all your files via a client and if you’re like me and already have thousands of images in Nextcloud then even with their bulk upload CLI tool it is too much of a hassle.
MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 months ago
ayaya@lemdro.id 9 months ago
From what I understand (I could be wrong) all of the images get imported into a single folder and are done via the database. I have my albums in individual folders. So not only would I have to recreate dozens of albums but I don’t think there would be any way to export them in the future. But if that isn’t how it works maybe I will give it another go.
dubba@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Storage Templates. Photos are stored in subdirectories categorized by date.
CLI Import. It looks like you may be able to import your albums with the cli and --album flag, not sure about exporting though.
ayaya@lemdro.id 9 months ago
Interesting. It is still going to duplicate all my images in the import process which I’m not a big fan of, but seems like it is worth taking another look at.
Opeth@lemm.ee 9 months ago
I switched from nextcloud to immich and the cli import was super easy and had a nice progress bar which made me feel productive. The images are just in directories on the filesystem unlike seafile.
10/10 would recommend. Shit feels premium as well.
spez_@lemmy.world 9 months ago
There’s an active pull request to add this in. Stay tuned
Chewy7324@discuss.tchncs.de 9 months ago
It’s planned to allow pointing immich to a directory as a read only gallery. This wouldn’t import the images, but still show them.
Can’t find it atm on my phone though.
Chaphasilor@feddit.nl 9 months ago
Immich actually organizes your photos in a simple directory structure, which is customizable (want to group by year? year+month? by day? not at all?). The images are right there in your file system and have the original file name.
The directory is “read-only” though, for the same reason as there is a need to import existing libraries: database synchronization.
Immich offers many features that require a database or pre-processing of files, which makes it fast and feature-rich. If you modify files outside of Immich, it cannot know what changed and loses track of where your media is.
As I said, the (read-only) file structure is always there in case you want to switch.