An initial library scan with 19k assets: 1m40s down to 9 seconds.
Insane!
I love the new features. It’s the small things, like locating an image on your timeline from an album, that make a difference. The improvements to external library scanning are promising. When I transfer my DSLR images to the Immich external library, it used to miss a few images, and I always had to rescan manually. I hope this update fixes that issue.
What is an “Immich external library”? I’m a user of Immich but not sure what that means.
If you have an existing photo library somewhere on a drive, and load it in immich keeping its own folder structure. In the docker compose file you map the external library to the container.
Thanks!
It keeps folder structure now? I remember when I tried to import my Digikam/Piwigo based collection, it would dump it all into 1 album flattening the hierarchy if directories.IIRC this was a technical decision on Immich choosing to use a list of albums vs a folder hierarchy. I’ll need to give it another try if it’s changed
On the drive your hierarchy is kept as it is if you use the external library feature. In this realease you can even browse the folder structure on mobile.
In Immich I did have to reorder all photos to their own albums, although I think there is a function that does this based on the folder structure. I did not try this however.
How far away is stable release? Timeline says early 2025 which is kind of now. Tbh I might install it now anyway, doesnt seem to be many breaking changes anymore
The only thing that breaks is my PC when I try to run most jobs concurrently. Just be patient with it. I’m using external libraries instead of importing directly to immich storage
Is external libraries just a volume mount outside of the config? In that case I would probably do the same with photos stored on my NAS
That’s right. I use unraid so I have my photo external share mounted as /library and immich uploads as a /immich_photos share.
What has to be fixed for me to use it in production is the apps connection to the back end to not break every time it’s updated. Because on iOS app updates are forced, but the server I update less frequently and if they’re not the same version the app doesn’t work.
For what it’s worth, I only ever had that be a problem once in the past year I’ve been using Immich. And I don’t update more than once a month. I think it is uncommon anymore for them to release updates for the app that are incompatible with various sever version iterations.
I’m going to have to let this loosen my photo collection! Looks awesome!