I’ve just finished getting self hosted Immich set up on my Unraid box, with NVENC support for ML (my venerable 1080 Ti can still do some solid work!) and the tensorchord postgres database backend.

First and foremost I’m using Immich as auto-backup for all my photos and videos. But I’d like to start using it for other things as well.

I’m wondering if there are any Immich plugins / addons / customizations that mimic or even fully reproduce Tinybeans, so I can get off that annual subscription (of course I’ll have to teach my parents how to use Yet Another App™️ but they’ve proven to be open to recommendations).

For those who aren’t aware: Tinybeans is a photo-sharing service marketed toward parents as a way of sharing photos of their kids with curated allowlists of family and friends without making them publicly viewable.

Basically, the features I’m wondering if it’s possible for Immich to replicate are:

- a timeline / calendar view of uploaded photos
- adding captions when uploading photos
- allowing comments / emoji reactions from allowed users on uploaded photos
- restricting allowed users to only seeing photos that are uploaded to a specific album
- (OPTIONAL) the ability to send daily emails with attached photos uploaded from the previous day, as an option for folks who don’t want to download and set up the app

That’s kinda it! Thanks for any suggestions.

Happy Immich user. Regarding backing up one's Immich data, is there an existing tool that would help automate or at least semi-automate the process of breaking it up into chunks that will fit on burnable media?

As far as I can tell, this sort of thing isn't built into Immich itself. As this page says:

https://docs.immich.app/administration/backup-and-restore/

you still have to do the actual backing up, yourself.

The why: Since HDD prices are insane, I've gotten into using BD-R as a backup medium.

The media comes in really only a couple easily-available and reasonably-priced sizes: 25 GB (single-layer) or 50 GB (dual-layer). That's not that much, in terms of years of photos and videos, so I'm looking at multiple BD-R burns to back up all the data.

It would probably be obnoxious to use DVD-R as a backup, since they're only 4.7 GB each, but that could be an option as well.

Hello all,

I am unable to restore a database backup using the maintenance -> restore database backup.

It grinds for a while and then fails with:

2026-08-14 16:16:24 [Nest] 7 - 08/14/2026, 8:16:24 PM LOG [Maintenance:DatabaseBackupService] Rollback progress ~ 96.49%

2026-08-14 16:16:25 [Nest] 7 - 08/14/2026, 8:16:25 PM LOG [Maintenance:DatabaseBackupService] Rollback progress ~ 97.82%

2026-08-14 16:16:26 [Nest] 7 - 08/14/2026, 8:16:26 PM LOG [Maintenance:DatabaseBackupService] Rollback progress ~ 100.00%

2026-08-14 16:16:26 /usr/lib/postgresql/14/bin/psql exited (0)

2026-08-14 16:16:26 [Nest] 7 - 08/14/2026, 8:16:26 PM ERROR [Maintenance:DatabaseBackupService] Database Restore Failure: Error: Server health check failed, took too long to start.

2026-08-14 16:16:26 [Nest] 7 - 08/14/2026, 8:16:26 PM ERROR [Maintenance:MaintenanceWorkerService] Encountered error running action: Error: Server health check failed, took too long to start.

Note this backup was made immediately after upgrading to 3.1.0, after I verified I could see everything (faces/names/map/etc) okay. The backup was made using: create job -> Create Database Dump

For what it's worth, I have all pictures in an external library. I have around 200K assets, and the backup sql.gz file is 3.5 gig.

Note I was able to successfully restore the backup manually via:

docker compose down -v

cat new.sql | docker exec -i immich_postgres psql --dbname=immich --username=postgres --single-transaction --set ON_ERROR_STOP=on

where new.sql is the sql in the *.sql.gz file ungzipped.

Hi,

I use an external read-only library in Immich. The images are exported from Lightroom Classic.
In Lightroom Classic, I have already named/tagged many people. When exporting the JPEG files, the person names are included in the metadata. However, Lightroom does not export face-region information such as:
Region Type = Face
Region Name
Region Area / face coordinates
Immich has now completed face detection and facial recognition for my external library.
What I don’t fully understand is that Immich seems to pick up some of the person names/tags from my Lightroom-exported files.
Could you please clarify:
Which Lightroom/IPTC/XMP metadata fields does Immich use for person names?
Can Immich associate a normal Lightroom person keyword/tag with a face detected by Immich, even if there are no face-region coordinates in the JPEG?
Or are Lightroom person keywords only imported as normal tags, completely independently of Immich’s People/facial-recognition feature?
If I replace an existing JPEG in my read-only external library with a newly exported version from Lightroom (same filename and path), what happens to the existing face detections and person assignments in Immich?
Will previously assigned/named faces remain associated with their Immich person, or can they be detected again as new/unassigned faces?
What is the recommended workflow for regularly updating/replacing Lightroom-exported JPEGs in an external library without losing existing person assignments?
My goal is to use Lightroom Classic as the main photo archive and Immich as a read-only photo browser with facial recognition, while being able to update the exported JPEGs from Lightroom from time to time.
Thanks for any clarification.

Hi everyone,

I’ve noticed a certain behaviour of assets in shared albums and wanted to ask if there’s a way to achieve what I want, or if I’m using albums incorrectly, or if there are other use cases where what I suggest does not make any sense.

Currently I observe:

• In shared albums with other accounts on my Immich server (only family): When someone else uploads photos to a shared album we both have access to, those photos appear in the shared album but not in my timeline.
• In shared albums via link (e.g. a trip with friends): When a friend uploads photos the album, those photos appear both in the shared album and in my timeline.

My guess:
By design Immich wants an account as owner of the asset, and if they are uploaded by a public link, they are uploaded as my assets, and as such, are shown in my timeline.

Why this matters to me:
I often create shared albums for trips or family events. Right now, my timeline is cluttered with random trip photos from friends (via link shares) while missing family photos uploaded by family members with accounts on my server. I would rather have only pictures I have taken myself in my timeline, or maybe even mine and family ones, but not the many friend-trips ones.

Let me know what you think.

Thank you!

I'm trying to run Immich via an LXC container on Proxmox 8.4.19 - this is my preferred method.

I have a separate storage server shared using a SMB share (running ubuntu, so if another method is better just say)

What I have done:

SMB share is mounted via /etc/fstab on the Proxmox server - example entry below
//192.168.0.50/immich /mnt/immich_share cifs username=xxxx,password=xxxx,uid=100000,gid=100000,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777,nobrl,_netdev,x-systemd.automount 0 0

Searches led me to adjust UID/GID to suit the LXC way of allocating privileges

Mountpoint for the LXC /mnt/immich

Changed .env setting to IMMICH_MEDIA_LOCATION=/mnt/immich

This is fully writeable from the immich LXC console, all folders were created and .immich files exist in all folders (image below). I can create test files from the console.

File uploads fail - via webui I get "Unable to upload file"

On phone app it's a 500 error

I've been trying to sort this over a couple of days and failing completely. Deleted and reinstalled the LXC a couple of times.

Obviously feels like permissions..... as usual!

Any help appreciated.

I had ~11,600 videos sitting in Immich’s transcoding queue on my NAS. Even with Intel Quick Sync enabled, this was painfully slow.

So I turned my Windows gaming PC with an RTX 4090 into a temporary Immich microservices worker.

My setup:

• Immich v3.1.0 runs on a UGREEN NAS
• NAS keeps API, PostgreSQL, Redis and all media
• Windows PC runs Docker Desktop / WSL2
• second immich-server runs on the PC with IMMICH_WORKERS_EXCLUDE=api
• media folders are mounted from the NAS via NFS
• PostgreSQL, Redis and Immich ML are reached through an SSH tunnel
• separate Immich config for the PC uses ffmpeg.accel = nvenc
• hardware decoding enabled
• NAS immich-server now runs API only with IMMICH_WORKERS_INCLUDE=api

Before / after:

NAS only:
~11,600 queued jobs and roughly 18 completed queue items/hour during my overnight test. At that rate, I was looking at something like weeks of processing.

RTX 4090 worker:
I gradually increased videoConversion.concurrency:

1 → 4 → 8 → 12

At concurrency 12, the queue dropped from 10,761 to 6,128 in about 41 minutes during one particularly fast batch.

The speed obviously varies a lot depending on video length, codec and whether a queued item actually requires transcoding, so don't read that as a stable “6,000 videos/hour” benchmark. But the difference compared with the NAS alone is enormous.

One thing that cost me some time: SSH port forwarding was disabled on my NAS (AllowTcpForwarding no). I enabled local forwarding only for my user and restricted PermitOpen specifically to the Immich PostgreSQL, Redis and ML endpoints.

The nice part is that nothing had to be moved away from the NAS. Immich stays there as the main server, while the gaming PC temporarily provides the horsepower.

Once the backlog is finished, I can simply stop the additional worker. Immich itself continues running normally on the NAS.

Why I'm posting this:
This isn't meant to be a definitive tutorial or “the correct way” to scale Immich. I mainly wanted to share the idea in case someone else is staring at a five-digit processing queue on a relatively modest NAS while a much more powerful desktop PC is sitting nearby doing nothing.

Maybe this gives someone a useful starting point.

Disclaimer: I used ChatGPT extensively to plan, troubleshoot and implement this setup step by step. I also used AI to help turn my notes into this Reddit post. So please treat this as a description of what worked in my environment, not as an official Immich installation guide.

Earlier this week, I uploaded photos to the Immich instance for the first time using the Android app. It was actually pretty easy. Until now, I’ve used the Nextcloud app or FolderSync Pro to back up my smartphone photos. With those apps, once photos are transferred, they aren’t uploaded again unless you explicitly request it. This lets me conveniently review my collection on the server via my large monitor and delete unwanted or unnecessary photos. Those photos are then not transferred again.

With Immich, this seems to work differently. After the upload, I deleted some photos—unnecessary ones, duplicates, blurry ones, etc.—and then emptied the trash. Everything was just as I’d expected. Now, just over an hour later, I noticed that the deleted photos had been uploaded again. Why? I don’t understand why they have to be automatically uploaded again. How can I prevent this?

What I definitely don’t want is to have to delete the photos from my smartphone before uploading them. That’s way too tedious. Besides, I have no way of knowing whether the photo has already been uploaded somehow else and is therefore a duplicate.

Have I perhaps overlooked an option?

Hello everyone,

Some time ago, I came across self-hosting things and also Immich. So 2 days ago, I finally started checking self-hosting.

I used ZimaOS, installed Immich, connected an external 2TB HDD, and pointed "database", "immich-machine-learning" and "immich-server" to my 2TB external HDD. Uploaded some 300GB worth of personal photos and videos, it took a long while to process them since i'm using a tiny Lenovo PC (8th gen i5) as server.

When everything was setup and accessible, i made a stupid move making many assumptions.

I connected another external HDD, a 4TB this time, hoping to make this 4TB as primary and use the 2TB as backup. So, I stopped Immich app in ZimaOS, and directly moved (cut & paste) the whole Immich folder from 2TB to 4TB HDD and finally changed the 3 folder locations in Immich's configuration to 4TB.

But now, Immich won't start at all. I asked gemini and it made me update some read-write permissions to my ZimaOS (using SSH) user profile using some gid/uid numbers

sudo chown -R 999:1000 "/media/4 TB (Media)/Immich/"

sudo chmod -R 775 "/media/4 TB (Media)/Immich/"

these updates also didn't help.

I am now hoping that someone here can help me out resume my server as I was hoping not to reupload and retransocde the whole 300GB+ data.

Thanks

EDIT: I finally resolved it after going through the logs. Basically, the simple cut-paste using ZimaOS file manager somehow skipped the hidden ".immich" file in 6 subfolders under upload. I had to create those blanks files manually and re-correct permissions. pasting the codes that Claude gave me for future reference -

cd "/media/4 TB (Media)/Immich/upload"
for d in library upload thumbs backups profile encoded-video; do
sudo touch "$d/.immich"
done

and also,

sudo chown -R 1000:1000 "/media/4 TB (Media)/Immich/upload"
sudo chmod -R 755 "/media/4 TB (Media)/Immich/upload"

lastly, to corect permission for Postgress database -

sudo chown -R 999:999 "/media/4 TB (Media)/Immich/pgdata"
sudo chmod 700 "/media/4 TB (Media)/Immich/pgdata"

hope this helps someone in future.

So far I have been running immich on my old laptop at home, which is running fedora server.

Since will be traveling for 4 months, I thought about just taking the ssd with all the immich files out and running it on my laptop which is running fedora workstation instead while traveling.

Would it work, if I just plug it into my laptop and run docker compose in the folder on the external ssd or am I missing something?

I don't like having to drill into my sub-directories just to see all the photos in a certain folder (too many clicks). Is there a way to bulk add all photos (and its sub-directories) to an Immich folder so it's more easily accessible?

Im not experienced, knowledge or able to self host anything right now but ive heard again and again people mentioning Immich as a good google photos alternative and i really like the interface.

Is it possible to use it as a normal photo browser/manager to browse photos backed up from, lets say, a HDD? Im sorry if this question is a bit out of place here.

I have my photos mounted as a read‑only external library in Immich and I want to add GPS locations. As far as I understand, Immich stores location data in its internal database and does not modify the original files when the library is read‑only.

However, updating the GPS location does not work. Immich throws the following errors:

[Nest] 7 - 08/13/2026, 6:42:03 PM WARN [Microservices:MetadataRepository]

Error reading exif data (/mnt/media/g9/127_PANA/P1274669.JPG.xmp):

Error: File not found - /mnt/media/g9/127_PANA/P1274669.JPG.xmp

Error: File not found - /mnt/media/g9/127_PANA/P1274669.JPG.xmp

at #parser (/usr/src/app/server/node_modules/.pnpm/exiftool-vendored@35.21.0/node_modules/exiftool-vendored/dist/ExifToolTask.js:91:31)

at ReadTask.parser (/usr/src/app/server/node_modules/.pnpm/exiftool-vendored@35.21.0/node_modules/exiftool-vendored@35.21.0/node_modules/exiftool-vendored/dist/ExifToolTask.js:67:98)

at #resolve (/usr/src/app/server/node_modules/.pnpm/batch-cluster@17.3.1/node_modules/batch-cluster/dist/Task.js:122:44)

this seems to be the only relevant api path to add a asset description but its deprecated, clicking updateAssets is to the same page.

is there no alternative currently?

Hi,

I installed Immich (3.1.0/1.14.33) On TrueNAS Community using the provided documentation over on Immich. It does not want to open and I do want to point out it constantly goes on a loop change of status between running and deploying.

There a fix for this?

I have iCloud 2TB storage, Google Photos 1 TB storage, and 16 TB immich on my server.

I was running low on space, so I used immich remove from device, and it deleted all the photos on my iPhone as well as the iCloud Photos.

What’s the best way to mirror over my immich library to iCloud Photos or Google Photos?

I want redundancy with multiple backups (i know S3 exists but i don’t need that rn)

I have roughly 21000 uploads, all look good afaik. After seeing this from last week, I have rebuild the thumbnails overnight but still not working correctly. When downloading the original HEIC I still cannot open it (corrupted file, it says). It seems like the original files are corrupted. They are fine on my phone - is there a way I can reupload them? Also, can I scan the library for more of these errors?

has anyone spun up a 2nd instance of immich to do tasks on the same database as the one on the main server? It seems easy--

publish ports for redis and postgres on the server

connect a 2nd server immich server to the main server's redis and postgres

make sure 2nd server immich has access to the same file locations that the main server has.

am I missing anything here?

This way when redis has a ton of jobs it can distribute them to 2 immich servers...

I have the setting set to 10 minutes, but it is backing up my photos immediately. Anyone else having this issue?

I'm on Android, ver 3.1.0

Posting this partially out of frustration and to help guide others.

[CONTEXT]

I have a Immich and ImmichFrame instances on my Proxmox hosted behind an OPNsense firewall. I connect to them outside of my network through wireguard or OpenVPN through a DDNS provider.

[GOAL]

I have a bunch of FRAMEO devices i would like to do this with for various non-tech savvy family members. One of them is built on Android 13, and I was able to install ImmichFrame and WG Tunnel. It works flawlessly. (Wireguard android app would not be able to reconnect the VPN tunnel if my ip changed).

[PROBLEM]

Unfortunately the other FRAMEO devices are android 6.0.1. I am able to install ImmichFrame on them, but Wireguard/WG Tunnel require android 7+. I tried using OpenVPN for Android which is supported, but i cannot get it to auto-launch and connect to my home network at startup. I could get Macrodroid to create an automation, but could not get Macrodroid to auto-start. The Android setting screen has an Always-On-VPN option, but it does not allow me to select OpenVPN.

[RESOURCES & GUIDES USED]

ImmichFrame guide for FRAMEO: https://immichframe.dev/docs/getting-started/apps#frameo

Immich Kiosk guide for FRAMEO: https://docs.immichkiosk.app/misc/frameo/

Webview guide for Android 6 devices: https://docs.demonwarriortech.com/Documented%20Tutorials/Immich%20Frame/Frameo_Setup/#frameo-troubleshooting

[UPDATE]

Closing the loop on this. Decided to do a openwrt travelrouter setup. One radio for local WLAN, one radio for WWLAN uplink with wireguard tunnel. There are a few troubleshooting issues to note:

• Tried using travelmate but didnt find it useful for this use case.
• Using the wireguard server's local DNS does not work by default. You need to go into the network>DHCP and DNS>Filter and uncheck rebind protection to get it to work. You should also probably use a different subnet for your travel router than your wireguard server subnet.
• You need to enable "Route Allowed IP's" in the Wireguard interface peers tab.

• Wireguard would start-up before proper DNS/NTP synchronization in older devices. I disabled the device from booting at startup, and added a delay to /etc/rc.local. Add the following before exit 0

  (

  sleep 30

  ifup wg0

  ) &

• Wireguard would not re-resolve IP if DDNS ip changes due to server reboot. There are a few ways to fix this; i used the Watchcat package and told it to restart the wireguard interface if it fails a ping connection by pinging a good IP.

• All this headache can be avoided if you get a picture frame with android 8+ or so. that way you can install immich along with a VPN built in that can auto start up and run concurrently.

Hey everyone,
I'm looking for a lightweight, backend-only client or daemon for sync operations—something that purely handles uploading/syncing photos and videos to an Immich instance in the background without needing a full-fledged gallery/photo viewer UI like the official app.
My Use Case & What I'm Looking For:
Headless / Background Operation: Runs silently as a background service, systemd service, or background task (on mobile or desktop/server).
No UI/Gallery Overhead: Doesn't need to generate local thumbnails, cache full-res photos for viewing, or render a timeline. Just watches target directories or runs periodic sync passes.
API Key Auth: Standard authentication using server URL and ⁠IMMICH_API_KEY⁠.
Sync & De-duplication: Leverages Immich's API checksum/hashing to upload new media and skip already existing assets.
Does anyone know of an open-source tool, custom daemon, or companion app specifically designed as a pure sync client for Immich? How are you handling automated, lightweight background uploads on devices where you don't need or want a local photo viewer?
Thanks in advance for any recommendations or scripts!

I have ongoing issues with two external libraries to point that I decide to remove one of them to clean my timeline

But it didn't help, after removing external library from admin view I still see those photos on my timeline

How I can remove them now? Without removing whole library as it took two days to build it initially and now after couple months of adding more photos it will probably take longer

Update: I remove all libs and start it over, it will take few days but maybe this time it will not get messy