Getting rid of the orphans
Hey everyone 👋
The title sounds horrible, but please bear with me 🙂
Attached is my post from Reddit (there's a strict character limit here on Discord, but In a nutshell, I lost my Immich photos, but I held onto to the DB, which is now preventing me from re-importing all those photos because Immich thinks I already have them (and I do, but only as DB entries).
Since that Reddit post a couple of days ago, I figured out that instead of deleting the DB and starting from scratch I can at least leave the DB and attach the old photo libraries as external libraries. That worked, but now I have still to get rid of the orphaned DB entries.
Initially, I needed a workaround for the Immich uploader to ignore the fact that the images I'm trying to upload are “duplicates” and let me “overwrite” the images with the ones I'm trying to re-upload. I say “overwrite” as the original images are gone from their location and DB entries are now orphans. As that approach wasn't possible (actually, do let me know if it is), now I'm attaching folders as external libraries and I am looking into a way to remove the orphaned DB entries.
I looked into the core deduplication tool, but I have 40K+ matches, and it's a mixed bag...sometimes it's the orphaned photo marked for trashing, but sometimes not.
I also tried https://github.com/Thoroslives/immich_remove_offline_files but that tool relies on the orphans report from the Immich Repair page, which has been hidden for some time, so the tool reports 404 on the expected /api/reports page.
Is there an easy/sane way to get rid of the orphaned files (if not to replace the orphaned files with their identical counterparts from the external lib or another storage location)? 🤞
I just updated to 1.133, that worked fine. I can share my yml and env, but I don't think they're that important for this particular puzzle.
Thanks for anyone checking this one out 🙂

7 Replies
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Successfully submitted, a tag has been added to inform contributors. :white_check_mark:Hi @voyager I am very curious as to why you would want to reuse the DB without the images
Every heavy lifting task will need to run again
Starting fresh and configuring accounts will be a lot less hassle than trying to remove broken entries
I've invested a lot of time to update location and dates on photos which didn't have those, dealt with some amount of duplicates present in the old photos, created faces and taught Immich which ones are important and which ones to ignore... so I was still hoping that there would be time in the future where I might have a chance to merge the data somehow, so that I can retain the work done so far 🫣
I'm starting to think you're right, and it would be less hassle to start from scratch again. This time the snapshots are running on the NAS 😅
What would be the easiest way to just drop the DB and let it create a new one from scratch? Can I keep thumbs folder, can I use any older data to recycle it? E.g., keeping what it learned about people would be useful.
If you don't have the images there is nothing you can keep
The easiest way to start over is composing down and deleting the postgres folder
Thanks @Mraedis I'll do that. All this let me do some housecleaning as well, including moving thumbnails to the SSD. 👌
Best of luck!
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