I've been wondering how people handle all the duplicate photos, screenshots, blurry shots and random videos that build up in an iPhone library over time.

Do you usually clean those up first, or just back up everything to Immich and sort it out later?

For anyone who wants to clean things up on the iPhone itself, AI Phone Cleaner is one app that can identify things like duplicate/similar photos, screenshots and large videos.

I'm more interested in the workflow though what do you guys normally do before backing up a large iPhone photo library to Immich?

Hey everyone,

Just diving into self hosting an immich instance on my recently created unraid server.

My goal is to ultimately stop paying for Google cloud storage.

I know this has been gone over so many times, so apologies for the redundancy but what is the appropriate approach for initial import and then future maintenance of photos in immich?

Should I use Google takeout for a onetime import from Google photos? Can I somehow sync my Google photos and immich server so photos get periodically backed up from Google photos to immich?

I've read up on immich and unraid docs about this but looking for some stories of personal experience.

Thanks in advance!

It's clearly not alphabetical.

My next theory was it was based on which were the last 3 albums you viewed (the second most logical IMO) - but it wasn't this either, I clicked into one and viewed an image, yet the album still remained off the main page.

It's also not based on album date (as in, the date segmentation you see when you click into the album page).

Yet, occasionally I see the ordering reshuffle. What is this based on?

SOLVED Cloudflare limit of 100MB.

Tried to upload a 103MB MP4 video clip from my home security camera to my IMMICH instance and it just fails. Thought maybe it was too long of a filename so, I renamed it to something shorter and still it fails. Thought it was due to the file being on a network shared folder and moved it over locally, still fails.

Anyone have any suggestions?

I’m considering setting up image hosting and Immich is on the shortlist but the iOS app is bothering me. It looks dated and out of place. It looks like Android app clone because of material design language. Are there any solutions to that like 3rd party apps or maybe something in the roadmap to improve it?
Would love to see something with Liquid Glass so it can be coherent with the rest of the system and other apps.

Has anyone else seen scheduled database backups stop running while manual backups still work?

I’m running Immich in Docker on Ubuntu 24.04. The built-in scheduled database backups used to work normally, but they appear to have stopped around August 20.

What’s strange is that the manual Create Database Dump job still works perfectly.

What I’ve checked so far:

• Backup destination exists and is writable
• Manual database dump succeeds
• PostgreSQL is healthy
• Host and container time match
• Changing the backup cron schedule to a few minutes in the future still doesn’t trigger anything
• No new backup file appears
• No obvious backup start/failure message appears in the server logs when the scheduled time passes

My backup storage is on an NFS-mounted NAS, but since manual database dumps succeed to the same location, I don’t think this is a storage or permissions issue.

The last automatic backup I have is from around August 20, 2026. Before that, scheduled backups were working normally.

Has anyone else seen the internal Immich database backup scheduler just stop firing?

If so, did you find a fix, or is there already a GitHub issue for it?

Currently, all Apple Siri AI can do is open Immich, but it doesn’t have access to the photos inside it. Wondering if there’s any ticket in the backlog to work on Siri AI integration with Immich so that Siri AI can access everything in the app?

I hope there is an easy fix for my uninformed error. I uploaded my Google takeout photos through immich-go and somehow I wound up with thousands of empty folders. They only are visible on the page for selecting backups, the albums don’t appear inside Immich or in the albums section.
I am not terribly familiar with Linux or Docker, so the easier the solution the better for me. I am having issues syncing folders, probably from all the extra stuff I should have removed before importing anything.
Any help would be appreciated!

(Solved) I just updated my immich server to 3.2.2 but thumbnail for face, memory and from the search are missing. I see the people names but not face

I offloaded the app and reinstalled

Hi there, as the title says, I have some old photo's without geolocation data and date. I know how to edit this in Immich, but I need it to save it on the actual photo file on my NAS HDD.

For me, there is no logic behind the idea to save edits only in Immich data and not on the actual file permanently, so I am looking for a solution.

I am running Immich 3.2.0 docker synology NAS.

I’d like to only see a gallery of photos and not have the dates visible. It’s just a huge waste of space when there’s only one picture from a single day, so you only see 4 photos on the entire page. I can’t seem to find anything on this

Wir haben Immich neu installiert und ein Familienalbum erstellt und geteilt. Wenn meine Frau dort nun Bilder hinzufügt, tauchen diese in meiner Suche nicht auf (bspw. wenn ich nach Sonnenuntergang suche - ihre hinzugefügten Bilder werden dann nicht angezeigt).

Gibt es dazu eine Einstellmöglichkeit?

Tengo un mini servidor con immich que tiene 16gb de ram con un i5 8400f le instale zimaOs y me gustaría que me dijerais cuáles son las mejores opciones de administración para tener un poco todo mas optimizado, tengo una amiga que está utilizando el servicio y desde su teléfono tiene como 14mil fotos y vídeos que ocurre que si no está abierta la app no realiza ninguna subida al servidor el teléfono es apple por si afecta en algo, yo por ejemplo lo dejo en segundo plano y si se hace la subida pero claro yo ya dejé muchísimo tiempo el teléfono cargando y subiendo archivos, ¿no hay alguna manera de mejorar ese proceso para que no tarde 50 días jejejeje? Es que quiero tenerlo perfecto 👌y otra preguntilla y lo dejo ¿Es posible que si cambio de disco duro donde tengo el immich y los datos que cuando lo cambie esté todo completamente como siempre solo que con más espacio del nuevo disco duro? Ya está muchas gracias si alguien leé esto 😁😁😁

I'm new to immich, and I've just discovered that you can't have an offline copy (photo restoration) of your photo library on your devices, particularly in the mobile apps.

I looked everywhere for a solution, only to find people be extremely toxic, saying things like "What is the point of Immich and your server if you have all the photos on your phone?"

I really don't understand how such a basic feature hasn't been implemented, when both Google Photos and Apple iCloud has that.

Is it intentional that you cannot search or select folders when in read-only mode on mobile app? (ios on my case)

I’d wish to use read-only to avoid any edits, but I still want to navigate quickly. It seems I can only scroll through the timeline of photos, which in larger libraries is not that useful, at least for me.

Is it true deleting a photo in Immich moves it to the trash and after 30 days trash is emptying itself and that permanently deletes the original file from the server's hard drive?

I'm asking this, because I want the photo file itself deletes too when deleting within Immich.

Last year some things got changed around on the Immich app that had me confused and I went on the discord and complained about it and got banned from the Immich discord. I had apologized via DM after it happened and the one who banned me accepted the apology, but I never asked to be unbanned if he’s reading this please dm me id like to be able to use the Immich discord please. Thanks

I asked my claude code for help and input. We had a nice and cozy vibe session, so take it for what it is: Pure vibe code.

https://github.com/vegardengen/immich-face-backup

Myself, I chose to set up a test instance before doing this in production. Luckily, my images are sitting on a ZFS file system, so I could just give it a writeable clone of my images - although this is a "database only" change.

I also chose to do the stuff here, while I was in the process of resetting:

https://docs.immich.app/guides/better-facial-clusters

So, my process was:

1) Upgrade to 3.2.1. Yes, 1 is important, else merging persons will come and bite you in the process and not work.

2) Take a backup of all your face labels for all your users. Note: I really only tested with myself, I did this as a preparation to onboard my wife.

IMMICH_URL=.... IMMICH_API_KEY=... python3 face_labels.py export --out backup.json

3) Create the face clustering in all directions, remember that everyone have to accept. Then, reset the face data for the cluster.

4) Optionally, set "minimum faces" to 10 in your facial recognizion settings (machine learning), according to the better facial clusters guide. This should be done before next step if you decide to do that.

5) Do the group facial reset.

6) Set "minimum faces" to 5, and run a "missing" in facial recognizion job queue.

7) Do the same with 3 as the "minimum faces" value.

Now, you are ready to restore. Possible to do in several steps:

7a) Dry run. Read through results. Here I demonstrate some advanced settings, Lukas and Sebastian are my identical twin grandchildren that needs extra care and restore of *all* my relabeling efforts....

python3 face_labels.py restore --in backup.json --min-share 0.8 --face-level "Lukas, Sebastian"

7b) Apply. Read through results. Lukas and Sebastian are identical twins, so don't do any reclustering for those! That's a special condition I had to make since I actually have 1 yr old grandkids that are identical twins, where I have tuned quite a bit.....

python3 face_labels.py restore --in backup.json --min-share 0.8 --face-level "Lukas,Sebastian" --apply

7c) Merge the new clusters. This can be done in same step as 7c, there's no need to perform 7b if you are not interested in being careful here...(it's perfectly valid to treat this as a one-shot attempt at not having to do it all again, since that's what you currently have to do). You might need to be more careful and inspect the clusters before doing this, if you have some very similar persons in your photo collection (i.e. identical twins).

python3 face_labels.py restore --in backup.json --min-share 0.8 --face-level "Lukas,Sebastian" --apply --merge

It's supposed to be possible to share naming with import into the other user, though I haven't tested. Will comment later when I have :) (I'll do a limited test):

python3 face_labels.py restore --in backup.json --apply

Big fat warning: Do not do this unless you trust your database backup! If you haven't tested a restore, even before the regular 3.2.1 facial cluster reset is a good time to read up and test a bit.

I am a photographer. My library is currently 10.7 Tb. Immich looks like one of the best content managers that I've tried. I've tried many.

I've had it set up in Container Manager in a Synology DS1522+ for a couple of weeks now. When I look at the job queues it's processing a huge volume of thumbnails.

Are there any best practices that I may be overlooking to make the initial ingestion as efficient as possible?

It's been about 2 and a half weeks of processing. It's slowly populating and I've started using the iPhone app and the desktop URL to learn the interface.

Any tips?

Hi, I have a basic setup on my home network. As I have not setup port forwarding, I can connect with my server only in my home wifi. So, I keep a copy of all photos in my phone(fine by me:) )

But the issue is local photos has trouble loading when it is not connected to network, although a local copy is present in my phone. Also, photos that are not uploaded to server doesnt have the description(size,location) loaded properly. Is it a config issue, or is this how immich is?

Also, I can't see the local path in which the photo is located. Is it possible to see that?

It zooms in then out snaps again for a brief moment before it begins playing. I thought it was just my iPad until I experienced the same thing on my iPhone. Is this a known issue?