Immich - Metadata, Portainer, Synology Photos, Immich_power_tools
Hello all, me again.. so a few months ago if you'd have asked me what my favourite thing is, I probably would have said Immich- the timeline view, the facial scanning, the organisation template that can be applied.. However, as detailed in another post, recently things have started to go wrong.
Metadata has started to be incorrectly populated, photos that we taken 5+ years ago started appearing in the memory section as 1 year ago. Further inspection of this showed me that more and more photos were becoming out of sync. I thought this was the perfect opportunity to then move from synology container manager and restart with portainer for a fresh install, as I could see that my photo's were still correct in the native ios photos and the app-who-must-not-be-named.
All went well, container was up and ruuning, the app was left overnight to resync all the photos, however the next day, even more photos were out of sync/showing the incorrect dates..
Numerous searches etc led me to suggestions of immich_power_tools. Now I'd tried to use exiftool, but didn't quite understand how that would work with the backup process of my phone, as in I take the photo and then expect it to be backed up to immich, so I can then copy that folder onto a harddrive using the library system - Y/M/D/description.
I've tried for the best part of 3 days now to get immich_power_tools to work, but needless to say, I cannot do it. I either get to a point where I'm told that information is missing, DB_PORT and DB_HOST or an application error a client side exception has occurred.
Scouring google doesn't seem to help, neither does chatgpt, I just end up swinging from one error to another.
As an aside, I have synology photos installed, and that is correctly showing the media.
My Qs are:
1. should I remove immich completely? (I don't want to, I really enjoyed it)
2. start again, risk of issue not being sorted
3. do I set up synology as external drive, back my photos up to that then import to immich?
18 Replies
:wave: Hey @bicolorebore586,
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References
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If this ticket can be closed you can use the /close command, and re-open it later if needed.Which subset of photos are incorrectly showing? Have you found a pattern (like all from x device for example)? Are newly taken images appearing incorrectly, or is it just the older ones?
I only have 1 device that uploads at the moment. I can't really see a pattern, it's predominately older photos being placed incorrectly, baby photos next to kid photos, Christmas photos in March
Are all images taken by that device, or multiple other older devices?
A range of iphones mainly. Some of the pictures that are out of sync are shared via whatsapp, but not all whatsapp shared photos are out of sync. I know that whatsapp strips metadata, but it hasn't been an issue until recently, and it's not all whatsapp images.
Are you able to get the photos off the device another way and validate their exif info?
Is it possible the images where whatsapp doesn't strip metadata are images with sent as "HD"?
Like this option you can select to send less compressed images
I have installed metadata apps to verify the data, for one of the photos, see attached images.
I'm not quite sure what this means?
In whatsapp when sending images you can select an option to not compress the images as much ("high quality images"). I'm wondering if those are the ones preserving metadata
ah ok, I don't think I've ever noted that setting, so they'll be sent via the default settings.
None of these fields are ones used in immich. So it's probably falling back to upload date
Ok, which field is used by immich?
The photo on the left is the photo information from immich for the photograph.
Is it worth me looking at a photo from whatsapp that has uploaded correctly to compare the information from an exif app?
What would you recommend be the corrective course of action?
The photo shows correctly in synology phots
Tehese are the fields. You need to pull a file and see if they are present using something like EXIF Tool to check the metadata fields
so I have installed EXIFTOO and compared one of the images left side shows the data from immich version, right side shows synology photos version, both have incorrect creation date, assume this is the upload date, difference is the modified date which is correct creation date for synology but incorrect for immich version
The “file mod” time is the file metadata itself, not the EXIF fields
I assume synology uses the file metadata if the image is copied to disk directly. Immich does not use these fields as they tend to be unreliable
hmm, they're both uploaded to the synology nas in the same way - both through the respective apps, nothing copied directly
Sure, we just don’t use file metadata