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

  • @starshipwinepineapple@programming.devEnglish
    15•2 hours ago

    In your docker-compose.yaml you need to add in your directory if you haven’t already

    services:
  immich-server:
    volumes:
      # Do not edit the next line. If you want to change the media storage location on your system, edit the value of UPLOAD_LOCATION in the .env file
      - ${UPLOAD_LOCATION}:/usr/src/app/upload
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
+     # Add NAS pictures and videos folders to use as External Libraries
+     - "/volume1/data/ Pictures:/usr/src/app/library/pictures"

    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/pictures from my example. Click add path

    That should get you good to go

    • StritEnglish
      2•1 hour ago

      This is the way to do it.

      Although, I can’t get it to do facial recognision on my external library for some reason.

    • @thanksforallthefish@literature.cafeOPEnglish
      1•54 minutes ago

      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

  • @cRazi_man@europe.pubEnglish
    3•2 hours ago

    You can add a folder to Immich as an external database. I didn’t want Immich to upload in the way you describe, so I stopped Immich auto upload and use a different solution to upload files onto my NAS in a normal folder structure and date/naming system. Then Immich just scans these folders every 6 hours to add photos into the library. This external folder is added in volumes under immich-server and immich-machine-learning. It has been working fine so far.