Hey all, I did check for an immich sub first, but you smart people seem to be my only option now reddit has banned me for refusing to give them an email address.
Background: So, I have a Ugreen DH2300 NAS it runs a cut down version of debian. I’ve got docker running on it, which is happily hosting Jellyfin. Basic config of the drive volume is from root I have a docker tree and also a data tree. Immich & Jellyfin under docker, movies pictures tvshows books under data. I have pictures indexed by Jellyfin and it works but it isn’t great. I have a vanilla copy of immich up and running, I can upload via web browser a pic at a time. The vanilla config puts those files in ./volume1/docker/immich/library/upload/very-long-random-number-directory
Where volume1 is the mounted displayed nas volume (from the nas host it’s /mnt/volume1 if you ssh in)
Problem:
I have a terabyte of pictures under ./volume1/data/Pictures that is not visible in docker
Importing 1 by 1 via web browser is obviously not ideal. It also copies the set of pictures from one directory on the NAS volume to a duplicate under library/upload - not great for space.
I’ve seen the CLI tool exists and if I ssh into the NAS I can see the /Pictures directory as well as the docker/immich/library etc directory but it also has the downside of duplicating all the photos into the immich directory
Ideally I’d like to just index it like jellyfin does when you add files to movies or tv shows. I can’t seem to even find a way to point the docker instance to the folder (i modified the .env file but it ignored it, so obviously got that wrong).
Is this the only way ?
EDIT Thank you all for the quick responses - I somehow managed to break the container altogether, so I’ll reinstall from scratch and then add your suggested “external folders” config and see how I go.
Thanks again


In your docker-compose.yaml you need to add in your directory if you haven’t already
Then in immich you need to add this as an external library. Click your profile icon -> administration -> external library -> create library. It will ask for a path and you need to use the library mount point within docker which was
/usr/src/app/library/picturesfrom my example. Click add pathThat should get you good to go
This is the way to do it.
Although, I can’t get it to do facial recognision on my external library for some reason.
Thank you so much for the quick reply, I have somehow managed to totally break the installation altogether (it’s now bootlooping), so I’ll kill it recreate and try the above and report back.
Much appreciated