What's the best practice for handling iOS/iCloud Photos? (Questions about external libraries)
TL;DR at bottom.
Hi, all. I decided to finally bite the bullet and move to Immich, since I'll be switching to daily-driving Android soon and wanted something cross-platform. I figured now was a good time to start self-hosting Immich.
However, I'm trying to figure out the best way to handle my pre-existing iCloud storage, with about 10,000 photos/videos (totalling about 100GB). Despite switching to Android, I still use iOS/iPadOS quite a bit, and would like to be able to continue syncing my iCloud photos, even after the switch.
The reason I'm conflicted is because I still need to clean and curate my collection; I have all sorts of screenshots and random downloads going back to 2016/2017 or so. I want to import everything into Immich, and then clean it all up so I finally have an organized photos album. I'm trying to decide if I should just point at icloudpd as an external library and manage that, or if I should import everything I have now directly to Immich, and then just use the iOS Immich app going forward.
Perceived pros/cons for icloudpd:
+ More reliable, doesn't depend on iOS's bad background management.
+ Faster.
+ Can delete photos in iCloud storage without deleting them from Immich (or local storage).
- Entire library isn't stored in the same place.
- Images deleted from Immich aren't deleted from the icloudpd folder, due to being an external library.
- Images deleted from icloudpd's folder are re-downloaded at next sync, unless they're removed from iCloud first.
Perceived pros/cons for using the Immich app:
+ Images are stored and managed in Immich storage directly, thus easier to back up.
+ Deleted images are actually deleted, and don't take up space.
- Slow, and unreliable on iOS.
- Essentially manual, do to background app refresh being useless.
TL;DR Trying to figure out how to keep my iCloud synced going forward. Despite being the most reliable option, my concern about using icloudpd is that it makes things very difficult to re-setup if I need to. If I delete a file in an external library, what happens if I need to reinstall Immich? Will those photos be re-imported, or will it remember that I deleted them? Why don't these photos count towards Immich's storage usage? I worry about these things. If I reimport that external library by doing something like changing it's path, or I move my install to a different server/computer, or I need to restore from a backup, will all of the things that I deleted from the external library show up again, and I'll have to do all of that work to clean them out again?
-# (Using Unraid and the AIO image, as well as the latest iOS app, but I think this is more of a general question than a technical one.)
11 Replies
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Successfully submitted, a tag has been added to inform contributors. :white_check_mark:Since you don’t even use iOS anymore the cleanest way would be iCloud pd export, import all into immich (using immich CLI probably) , setup good backups, and make a clean break from iOS
100GB is not very large and should be easy to set up offsite backups. Backblaze can do it for USD0.60/month
I would hardly call immich “slow and unreliable” on iOS, especially if the photos are all Immich native and not many on iOS photos
10k photos is a small library tbh
I mostly call it "slow and unreliable" due to the stories I've heard about background sync not working
But I figured exporting it was the move. I'm just mostly wondering since I do still use other iOS devices that I would like to sync (like an iPad), and I still plan on using my iPhone for things like concert footage
But I can do those manually, if it's so infrequent
(Or maybe I just need more faith in background sync, I've just heard that syncing on iOS is "effectively manual-only")
It’s not reasonable to expect 10,000 images to sync in the background, mostly because of how iOS locks down external apps. Even Google photos struggled when I used it
It’s definitely not manual only. Maybe for large videos you might have to open the app
gotcha
good to know !!
if I enable background sync on my recents after doing an iCloudPD import, will it still try to sync my backlog?
Yes. Immich works best with a smaller on device library , and not great with a massive iCloud library
There’s some room for optimizing which is being worked on but it’s also never going to be perfect because of how Apple is
makes sense
so I should disable the iCloud sync option, then
which would significantly reduce the amount of things on device to just the most recent
I assume that Immich will de-dupe?
Yes, immich will de dupe. And limiting all the iCloud Photos on the device will greatly help
Even then 10k is notTHAT large
The big issues with iCloud Photos tend to be 3-5+x that size
That makes sense
i appreciate the tips, thanks!
Just be patient with the initial import. Keep the iCloud pd download handy. Don’t be surprised if you have to start over a few times to get everything exactly how you want with metadata etc
makes sense
when it scanned via external library, it seemed pretty complete