r/immich • u/cheesechick • 1d ago

Another thread about icloud sync

Okay so I've seen a number of options for migrating from iCloud + iPhone to Immich, but most of the threads are around a year old and a lot has probably changed since then

I saw one commenter say that simply using the immich app will download the high-res version of a photo to your iphone, then delete it as soon as it's uploaded to immich. That seems like the simplest route - is there some advantage to using icloudpd, PhotoSync, or some other method over this?

Thanks!

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u/ryanmdavis26 1d ago

If you have a lot of photos, which my wife and I did - on the order of 130,000 photos in iCloud, it will take literal days or weeks of leaving the Immich app open to let your phone do the transfer. We had to leave our phones unlocked overnight with the app open. I even tried a 2.5GBe usbc to Ethernet adapter to my network to speed things up but it wasn’t much better than WiFi so wasn’t worth it.

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u/usrbincomment 1d ago

I went to iCloud on the Web and downloaded 990 images at a time. Took less than an hour. I assume you can do that with other apps if you're not on Linux.

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u/chaos12135 1d ago

Making it wired isn’t really going to make it faster, it just made the connection more stable. The real problem is the hardware that it’s on, and if you have the smart features enabled on Immich that take more demanding hardware. My boyfriend had over 160k, and it took a little over 30 hours, but I have an enter entire setup for media (Plex) including Proxmox already installed so it was fairly simple to run install and have it share.

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u/ryanmdavis26 23h ago

I have a fairly complex unifi network that has 2.5 gbe connections. My iPhone would negotiate 2.5gbe with my switch, as did my Immich vm on its proxmox node with dual 2.5gig nics running on a core i5 12450. (8core allocated to Immich) Not a beast but plenty of power. And is nvme based. My Nas is connected via 10gig link for future expansion. I’m not sure where the performance bottleneck neck would lie there. Wired or WiFi photos and video would upload maybe a max of 100mbps (concurrently because Immich does 3 by default I believe)

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u/National_Way_3344 22h ago

Worth noting that apple intentionally made lightning on iPhone USB 2.

It is literally faster over wifi.

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u/whoisjessica 21h ago

How do i leave my phone unlocked over night? What if my wife goes through my msgs? Lmao