Immich (Docker) compressing iPhone ProRAW DNG — how to preserve full original file?
Hi! I’m running the latest version of Immich in Docker on my NAS, and I’m backing up photos from my iPhone. I shoot in ProRAW, and I’ve noticed that the original files on my iPhone are around 60–90MB, but the DNG files uploaded to Immich are only about 2–3MB.
It seems Immich is receiving a compressed version of the ProRAW file, even though it’s still in DNG format — but the quality and metadata are clearly reduced.
Is there a way to ensure that the full, uncompressed ProRAW files are uploaded to Immich? I want to preserve the original photo exactly as it is on my iPhone.
Any ideas or settings I might be missing?
7 Replies
:wave: Hey @juliador,
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If this ticket can be closed you can use the /close command, and re-open it later if needed.What's the upload path here? What are you backing up to immich from where
How are you checking the image size
seems like a problem with the app? did you search github for an issue? I don't recall seeing any setting to fix something like this myself.
Neither the app nor the server would do anything to compress a DNG file, and there is actually no way it would be able to output a compressed DNG anyway
What are you basing these file sizes on?
I assume the more likely case here would be based on how we request it from iOS, we get a compressed / lower quality version
(which may or may not be avoidable?)
The only thing that comes to mind is that if you “share” the image from another app into immich on ios, the shared image will be a compressed jpeg rather than the original by default
But even then it would be a jpeg, not a dng file
Hey everyone! I did some digging and found out that Immich doesn’t have a licensing agreement with Adobe to properly handle the ProRAW package from iOS. Since Adobe manages the DNG format, all the detailed photo data gets lost when the image is flattened like a JPG and then stored as a DNG.
The only way to preserve the original quality is to manually upload the file from the iPhone directly into Immich’s photos folder—this way it accepts the full-quality DNG without conversion. So the issue is really with the sync process.
For example, I also tested SyncPhotos from Ugreen NAS, and it behaves the same way. Their support team kindly explained that full ProRAW support might come in the future, but it requires third-party licensing and may never arrive—or might take a long time.
Same story with Immich, unfortunately. I’m honestly surprised more people haven’t reported this. Seems like professional users either don’t use Immich or don’t rely on ProRAW for future editing. Cheers!