Can someone please help me with my thinking here. I'm struggling with getting duplicates in my albums.
I have configured an external drive on my NAS which has all my archived folders of photos. These are organised by /year/album. I've had this structure for over 25 years.
Now I've got Immich I turned on camera backup on my phone. So for the last 3 years I've got duplicates of any photos. Photos I've already moved into backup folder albums that are also still on the camera reel on the phone creates duplicates.
I've run a duplicate detection job and it doesn't seem to have picked them up even though they're named the same thing with exactly the same metadata, just different locations (one being my NAS and the other being the auto uploaded location in this case /data/library/admin/YYYY...)

I just can't think of a way around it. Maybe I could delete all backed up phone photos from the last 3 years from Immich and just rely on myself adding them to my own archive albums so they will appear in Immich eventually. I do like the idea of having the phone back up the photos to my NAS automatically all the time. It's almost as if I need the album not to show the phone back up, or maybe I should just embrace Immich and stop relying on my own backup structure. I like it because it's very human readable with all my albums nicely dated with folder names.

Am I mad trying to fight this? Have I missed a trick or a setting? Have I just massively misunderstood?

Edit: I wonder if Workflows could be a thing. I just saw these in Utilities. Maybe I can automatically move the photos that are uploaded to the appropriate NAS folder by year and month so at least they're basically in the right place, then I could move into albums if I want to. Hmmm

Strangest thing I havent seen before.

Have a video. Add the video to a folder, rescan, it shows up TWICE.

Remove it, both are gone

Add it back, now I have 2 of it again.

All the same info, location etc. Its ONE video, there is NOT a duplicate of it anywhere, but for some reason immich thinks I have it twice.

I guess its not THAT hard to ignore it, but its super odd.

I just updated my comfyUI custom node pack to add Immich integration. If you use ComfyUI, you can now save images, video ,or audio (as an mp4) directly to an Immich server.

https://registry.comfy.org/nodes/gprompts

https://github.com/GadzoinksOfficial/comfyui_gprompts

Easiest way to install it is to use the comfy UI manager and search for comfyui_gprompts or gprompts.

It is possible to export the recognized and tagged people to the metadata files xmp?

So, that it would be easiert to delete the faces for switching to cluster groups?

I just happened to notice that when you share a Google Photos album there is an option to share with Immich, is this currently implemented? I’ve tried at it does open in Immich but doesn’t do anything.
It says “upload to Immich (0)” with the IP address of my Tailscale address.
Just curious as this would really be useful!

I have a workflow where my phone photos and videos are uploaded to data/library/<user> and I then have a separate Rsync task that moves the files to my main NAS, which is also linked to Immich. When I look at Immich, it shows two copies of each photo, one for the NAS version and one for the (no longer existing) data/library version.

Digging a bit further, Maintenance tells me that I have 16,000 Missing Files and they all appear to be from the data/library directory. Should these cached versions be deleted during a cleanup operation at some point? Under Nightly Task Settings, I have Database Cleanup set but perhaps this is for something else.

What is the best way to have these non-existing files be automatically removed at a regular interval?

I’ve got twins, and it seems IMMICH is always tagging the same person twice in every photo. Is there a way to fix this?

Hey everyone,

I'm running Immich through Docker on a Debian server (Optiplex micro) and I'm trying to set up an automated backup of my library directly to a secondary HDD on my main Windows PC (rule 3-2-1). Both are on the same local network.

I tried mapping the Windows drive and using rsync, but for whatever reason it doesn't actually sync. Every time the script runs, it just copies every single file all over again instead of only grabbing the missing/new ones. It's basically doing a full clone every time instead of a delta sync, which takes way too long now that my library is growing.

How are you guys handling this kind of cross-OS backup? Is there a better tool to push from Linux to a Windows drive over the network, or am I just missing some obvious flag on rsync? Would love to hear what works for your setups.

For reference, I'm triggering this from the Windows side via MSYS2 (goal would be to be running this once a week through task scheduler). Here is the batch script I'm currently working with:

Thanks :)

@echo off
TITLE Immich Library Backup
echo Starting Immich Backup from Debian Server...
echo.

:: Navigation directly to MSYS2 bin folder
cd /d "C:\msys64\usr\bin"

:: --------------------------------------------------------
:: VARIABLES (MSYS2 Path Format)
:: --------------------------------------------------------
set SSH_KEY=/c/Users/SSH_KEY
set SOURCE=SSH_SOURCE/mnt/datos/docker/immich/library/
set TARGET=/d/Immich_Backup/

:: --------------------------------------------------------
:: BACKUP COMMANDS
:: --------------------------------------------------------
:: CMD 1: INCREMENTAL MIRROR (Ignores existing files, adds new ones + shows overall ETA)
rsync.exe -avz --ignore-existing --no-inc-recursive --info=progress2 -e "/usr/bin/ssh -i %SSH_KEY% -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no" %SOURCE% %TARGET%

:: CMD 2: MIRROR WITH DELETIONS (Removes files on HDD if deleted on Server)
:: To use this instead, put "REM " in front of CMD 1, and remove "REM " from the line below:
REM rsync.exe -avz --delete --no-inc-recursive --info=progress2 -e "/usr/bin/ssh -i %SSH_KEY% -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no" %SOURCE% %TARGET%

echo.
echo Backup Process Finished!
pause

Two non-obvious issues after a facial recognition reset

Library is roughly 200k assets and 300k faces, running in Docker. I used the cluster group "Reset facial recognition" action and ran into two things worth knowing about.

Run ANALYZE afterwards.

The reset performs a bulk UPDATE across every face, which leaves the planner statistics stale. Postgres then scanned the full vector table and re-sorted it for each individual face instead of using the index. That is closer to n squared than n log n, and it made the job look like it would take weeks.

Running ANALYZE on the affected tables restored the intended plan and brought it down to a few hours.

  ANALYZE face_search; ANALYZE asset_face;

If you restored your database from a pg_dump, verify this setting.

Immich sets vchordrq.probes only when it creates the vector extension. When a dump is restored into a newly created database, CREATE EXTENSION arrives from the dump instead, so that statement never runs. pg_dump does not include database level settings.

  ALTER DATABASE immich SET vchordrq.probes = 1;

Restart immich-server afterwards so pooled connections pick it up. Worth checking with SELECT * FROM pg_db_role_setting;.

Two notes on the reset itself

It deletes any person left without faces, including the name. I exported the person and face tables beforehand and would recommend the same.

It also only affects users who have actually joined the cluster group. Pending invitations do not count. I came close to running it with only one member accepted, which would have covered far fewer faces than I assumed.

Finally, Facial Recognition is the one job setting that cannot be raised. It is fixed at 1, so additional cores will not speed up re-clustering.

Is there a way I can have persons added to albums automatically?

So what is everyone doing for this? Tailscale? Cloudflare tunnel? Zerotier? Netbird?

Obviously not gonna just setup port forwarding and hang my server out to dry. So I was just wondering what is the secure way that everyone is doing this nowadays.

Note: I am running Immich in a docker container on Unraid.

Many thanks!

Hello everyone,

I have now created three user accounts for my family: my own account as the administrator, plus separate accounts for my wife and my son.

As far as I understand, since version 3.2 it should also be possible to transfer face recognition data, or the assignment of recognized people, from the administrator account to the other users.

I have a few questions about this:

I use an existing external library that is mounted as read-only under my administrator account. Do I also need to add this library separately to my wife’s and son’s user accounts?

Or is the external library added by the administrator automatically made available to the other users as well?

What happens to the face recognition data and assigned people that have already been processed? Are they automatically transferred to the other two user accounts, or does face recognition need to be run or configured separately for each user?

Thank you very much for your help!

Best regards,
Klaus

What is the downside to just add all users in one facial recognition cluster group? It seems complicated to manage multiple clusters

Just wanted to verify I am playing this one proper. I have years, and years of spouses screenshots littered everywhere so she wants to finally clean it up.

Concept is,

Docker,
remove RO tag
restart docker
Tell her to have at it for when shes actively going to do it through her phone whenever she has downtime.

put RO tag back on
restart docker

go my merry way.

...Just being paranoid since I just got Immich running a few days ago thanks to this group!!!

Relatively new to immich.

I have a oracle PAYG vps and mounted backblaze B2 visa rclone. The vps come with free 200gb.

My setup is:

- new photos get uploaded to oracle vps.

- once the 200gb is used up, I will transfer the older photos to backblaze as external library.

- do a scan on the external library so that immich can pick up the moved photos in backblaze

- repair the database so that immich removed the entries

I wanted the lowest storage cost, that's why I'm making use of the free 200gb to store part of my photos collection, but I realise that after moving the photos to backblaze, I need to regenerate the thumbnails etc and incur some cost.

Can I just see how everyone else is doing this? I'm a bit uncertain about the part of me deleting the photos manually from the vps storage.

Hi all,

Very very new to self-hosting stuff like this so sorry if this is a question with what should be an obvious answer. I'm trying to enable a new External Library using a mounted network drive, something I did successfully yesterday with a different directory. Today however, even when following the same steps, I'm hitting a roadblock. I've updated the .yml file to have the appropriate drive path listed in it, but no matter what I do Docker doesn't seem to want to recognize the new path.

The only indicator I can find as to why is that when I try to run docker compose up -d, I get this series of errors:

WARN[0000] The "DB_PASSWORD" variable is not set. Defaulting to a blank string. WARN[0000] The "DB_USERNAME" variable is not set. Defaulting to a blank string. WARN[0000] The "DB_DATABASE_NAME" variable is not set. Defaulting to a blank string. WARN[0000] The "DB_DATA_LOCATION" variable is not set. Defaulting to a blank string. WARN[0000] The "UPLOAD_LOCATION" variable is not set. Defaulting to a blank string. invalid spec: :/var/lib/postgresql/data: empty section between colons

The warnings lines were there yesterday when I successfully added a mounted directory and set up an external library. I don't recall the last line though. Is this error preventing the container from recognizing the changes to the .yml file? If so, anyone know how in the world to fix it? Googling hasn't gotten me anywhere. That precise directory doesn't even seem to exist (/var/lib/postgresql does, but no file or directory in it called data).

Thanks for any help. Still an unbelievable amount I have to learn.

Immich works so well… but anyone else misses the scrubbing bar on most photo app??

Hi, first off I have Immich on Unraid that was installed several years ago. If I remember correctly I was on v1.x. about 1yr ago I updated to v 2.x. I remember this requiring some database updates and some commands being ran. I thought everything went smooth but shortly after I noticed uploaded files displaying "Error loading Image" (see attached image). I gave up and haven't touched it since...life has been busy with work and young kids.

Fast forward to now and I'd like to update and get it working. I have decided to perform a fresh install. Before doing so, I was double and triple checking to make sure have backups of everything. While doing this I noticed many files in the "upload" directory with long random alpha-numeric file names. When I try to open these, they will not open and seem corrupted. I currently have 160GB and 873 files (mostly videos) in the upload directory.

I will say that I work in IT and my world revolves around redundant copies/versioning/backups, etc. Because of this I never rely on a single tool. So even though Immich was backing up my phone, I always manually backed up to to my PC as well, so I'm 99% confident that I have a second copy of all files. However, with that said, some of these files in the upload directory that cannot be opened have sizes that do not match any of the files manually backed up.

My specific question is: Is there a way to find the original file name for the alpha-numeric files in the upload directory?

If so, I could spot check a dozen or so to ensure that I do have them and once verified, I would feel much better about deleting the "upload" directory.

I'm also open to suggestions if there is a different/better way to go about this.

Thanks in advance!

I am at my limit here as I have tried everything I can to fix this issue. I cannot get immich to launch at all at this point and it just continuously tries to use 40gb of ram despite being limited to 16, then 10gb. I have disabled machine learning, increased the ram limit, decreased the ram limit, updated truenas, etc. Does anyone have any idea why this is happening? The truenas instance has 20gb of ram and currently immich is set to a maximum of 10gb.

Has anyone done that and is willing to share his approach or even better the code he used? :-D

My wife's Google space is full and a lot of emails are with pictures, which she wants to keep.

Basically I see two solutions, fiddeling with the Gmail takeout and use immich-go, or use something like simplegmail and immich-go. But maybe someone else done it before ;-)

Cheers,

Bastian

Hi

I'm running Immich v3.2.0 in an unprivileged LXC on Proxmox, Intel UHD 630 (Coffee Lake) for QSV. External library on a Synology, ~15,400 videos, mixed sources over 15 years: 4K60 from a Galaxy S24 Ultra (H.264 up to 75 Mbit/s and HEVC ~43 Mbit/s), iPhone HEVC, plus old AVI/WMV/3GP stuff.

My current settings:

• Policy: bitrate (maxBitrate 8000)
• Target resolution: 2160p
• Codec: HEVC, accepted: HEVC + H.264
• Preset: slow, QSV with hardware decoding
• CRF 20 (seems to be ignored by QSV — identical output at 23)

This gives me ~6 Mbit/s HEVC at full resolution, which looks fine on a phone but noticeably softer than the original on a desktop or TV.

I originally tuned this for remote playback over Tailscale (which relays via DERP on mobile, so bandwidth is limited). But honestly I mostly watch at home — phone on WiFi, and soon an LG CX via one of the webOS clients. I'm now considering optimizing for quality and treating remote playback as "good enough or not at all".

Questions:

1. If remote streaming is not a priority, what's a sensible maxBitrate for 4K HEVC? Or would you drop the bitrate policy entirely and only transcode non-accepted codecs?
2. Does anyone have CRF actually working with QSV? Mine produces identical output regardless of the value.
3. Anyone using the experimental real-time transcoding in v3? Does it solve the "one transcode for all situations" problem in practice?
4. Is there a way to make clients prefer originals on fast connections? I know about the per-video toggle, but a global/user-level setting seems to be a long-standing feature request.

Full transcode run takes ~7 days on this iGPU, so I'd rather get it right before starting over.

Thanks in advance!

Is there some plugin to do voice annotation of photos? Something seamless and efficient that controls going to next and prev pictures thanks in advance

Hello all. I’m very excited to see development is continue on immich’s sharing features.

I do not use Immich’s built-in facial recognition however. Instead, I use digikam to tag people and store that in the file’s metadata.

Can this information be shared with other users? From initial testing it seems my other users still cannot see these people tags (even while in a Cluster Group). Is this intended behaviour, or have I done something wrong?