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this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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I 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.
Plus I don't want to be locked into their format, I want to be able to switch if the project goes under or I find something better later on. Nextcloud's photo management is not great but I am willing to sack some speed and usability for using raw folders rather than a database.
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.
I didn't see any unique format for how Immich stores photos, they're just on the filesystem as images.
From what I understand (I could be wrong) all of the images get imported into a single folder and albums are done via the database. I currently 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.
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.
Interesting. Being able to import them using the folders as albums is fantastic, although it seems like there is no {{album}} variable for the storage template so the problem still persists. Once I'm using it there would be no easy to way to export the albums out.
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.
There's an active pull request to add this in. Stay tuned
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.