Immich not recovering storage space (devs help please!)

So this is something Ive posted on a few times now on reddit. Previously its when I renamed an external folder, causing Immich to reprocess everything. With this new event that happened today it is even more blatant of an issue and I'm really hoping to get some help or see if Immich dev team can look into this. Background - Been using Immich 8mo now, using an external library with about 80k assets, on my NAS. I never upload anything directly to immich or use the storage templates. Im on 1.135.3, and update approximately every version, checking for any release note changes needed. Outside of this, Ive had a problem free experience. Using immich has been rock solid. Just trying to recover my unused space Today I, through a windows duplication app, deleted out 4000 videos/pics from the external library folder. I dont know exactly how much space this was but about 100gigs deleted from the external library. Prior to doing any deletions I looked in the lower left of the webui and it was 244gig of space used. After rescanning/processing the jobs its at 263gb (and still rising I believe). Additionally none of those items have shown up in my trash like i had seen in the past. Can someone help me understand how removing 100gb from my external library has INCREASED my Immich storage size by 15gigs or more? How would it increase at all? And how do I ensure the items I deleted, get removed in every possible way from Immich? (thumbnails, references, etc). When I first posted on this I had 80gig left on my SSD but now I am getting down to 35gig because things dont seem to clear themselves out. I suppose I could start all over and reprocess everything but I know that will take a week or two to run.
142 Replies
Immich
Immich3mo ago
:wave: Hey @RoachForLife, Thanks for reaching out to us. Please carefully read this message and follow the recommended actions. This will help us be more effective in our support effort and leave more time for building Immich :immich:. References - Container Logs: docker compose logs docs - Container Status: docker ps -a docs - Reverse Proxy: https://immich.app/docs/administration/reverse-proxy - Code Formatting https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/210298617-Markdown-Text-101-Chat-Formatting-Bold-Italic-Underline#h_01GY0DAKGXDEHE263BCAYEGFJA Checklist I have... 1. :ballot_box_with_check: verified I'm on the latest release(note that mobile app releases may take some time). 2. :ballot_box_with_check: read applicable release notes. 3. :ballot_box_with_check: reviewed the FAQs for known issues. 4. :ballot_box_with_check: reviewed Github for known issues. 5. :ballot_box_with_check: tried accessing Immich via local ip (without a custom reverse proxy). 6. :ballot_box_with_check: uploaded the relevant information (see below). 7. :ballot_box_with_check: tried an incognito window, disabled extensions, cleared mobile app cache, logged out and back in, different browsers, etc. as applicable (an item can be marked as "complete" by reacting with the appropriate number) Information In order to be able to effectively help you, we need you to provide clear information to show what the problem is. The exact details needed vary per case, but here is a list of things to consider: - Your docker-compose.yml and .env files. - Logs from all the containers and their status (see above). - All the troubleshooting steps you've tried so far. - Any recent changes you've made to Immich or your system. - Details about your system (both software/OS and hardware). - Details about your storage (filesystems, type of disks, output of commands like fdisk -l and df -h). - The version of the Immich server, mobile app, and other relevant pieces. - Any other information that you think might be relevant. Please paste files and logs with proper code formatting, and especially avoid blurry screenshots. Without the right information we can't work out what the problem is. Help us help you ;) If this ticket can be closed you can use the /close command, and re-open it later if needed.
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
NOTE - Believing this may happen, I did grab some IDs of items that were deleted (a pic and 3gig video). When I go to the URL for these it says Not found or no asset.read access (400). Is there a way I can check if a thumbnail or similar file taking of space may exist still? Or through the DB via cli? Is there a job or DB command to clear out the junk? Additional Unfortunately I didnt check the number of assets in the Immich Admin area prior but I do use Homepage (self hosted app) which is connected to Immich via API. Prior to starting it showed 64,337 photos and 6,304 videos. After deleting the files, in the Immich WebUI it shows the same numbers. Steps performed 1 Checked the file size in lower left of Immich WebUI, showed 244gig of 300gig used 2 Used AllDup windows app connected to my NAS folder and over an hour, removed 4000dupes, about 100gigs. 3 Rescanned and reprocessed via the Admin > Jobs menu 4 Refreshing WebUI the same value in lower left continue to rise. At 265gbg currently. 5 In the past, the deleted files would show in the Trash on the left side of the menu. They have not shown up. I have my Trash Settings to enable Trash and number of days is set to 30 currently Docker compose file name: immich services: immich-server: container_name: immich_server image: ghcr.io/immich-app/immich-server:${IMMICH_VERSION:-release} #combined into single compose #devices: # - /dev/dri:/dev/dri extends: file: hwaccel.transcoding.yml service: quicksync # set to one of [nvenc, quicksync, rkmpp, vaapi, vaapi-wsl] for accelerated transcoding 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 - /mnt/immich:/photos env_file: - .env ports: - 2283:2283 depends_on: - redis - database restart: always healthcheck: disable: false immich-machine-learning: container_name: immich_machine_learning # For hardware acceleration, add one of -[armnn, cuda, openvino] to the image tag. # Example tag: ${IMMICH_VERSION:-release}-cuda image: ghcr.io/immich-app/immich-machine-learning:${IMMICH_VERSION:-release} #extends: # uncomment this section for hardware acceleration - see https://immich.app/docs/features/ml-hardware-acceleration #file: hwaccel.ml.yml #service: openvino # set to one of [armnn, cuda, openvino, openvino-wsl] for accelerated inference - use the -wsl version for WSL2 where applicable volumes: - model-cache:/cache env_file: - .env restart: always healthcheck: disable: false redis: container_name: immich_redis image: docker.io/redis:6.2-alpine@sha256:eaba718fecd1196d88533de7ba49bf903ad33664a92debb24660a922ecd9cac8 healthcheck: test: redis-cli ping || exit 1 restart: always database: container_name: immich_postgres image: ghcr.io/immich-app/postgres:14-vectorchord0.3.0-pgvectors0.2.0 environment: POSTGRES_PASSWORD: ${DB_PASSWORD} POSTGRES_USER: ${DB_USERNAME} POSTGRES_DB: ${DB_DATABASE_NAME} POSTGRES_INITDB_ARGS: --data-checksums # Uncomment the DB_STORAGE_TYPE: 'HDD' var if your database isn't stored on SSDs # DB_STORAGE_TYPE: 'HDD' volumes: # Do not edit the next line. If you want to change the database storage location on your system, edit the value of DB_DATA_LOCATION in the .env file - ${DB_DATA_LOCATION}:/var/lib/postgresql/data restart: always volumes: model-cache: null networks: {} df -h. Running this on Proxmox LXC using Dockge. Storing Immich on SSD (top one below) and my files on at a HDD called Atlas, mapped thru conf files ini proxmox. root@Immich:~# df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/mapper/pve-vm--110--disk--0 301G 267G 20G 94% / atlas 48T 21T 27T 45% /mnt/immich none 492K 4.0K 488K 1% /dev udev 16G 0 16G 0% /dev/dri/card0 tmpfs 16G 0 16G 0% /dev/shm tmpfs 6.3G 580K 6.3G 1% /run tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock overlay 301G 267G 20G 94% /var/lib/docker/overlay2/bcf4733102c42e080a7e6b7474b3674a09cac9840ea10f5cd8ac618b07dcdf04/merged overlay 301G 267G 20G 94% /var/lib/docker/overlay2/0df6ca00c187e4feae7860f3f8fdbb2f3e60e474811fa03031341fd0a088fb8e/merged overlay 301G 267G 20G 94% /var/lib/docker/overlay2/67cae80d009d8195d8bb34c4643b37e167fde26231e608e875ac4b26245494ff/merged overlay 301G 267G 20G 94% /var/lib/docker/overlay2/fbecc231804cd5f4204b1b342b9a3ee7549cd6e6f7f1fb6bca70d5d2764e54f5/merged overlay 301G 267G 20G 94% /var/lib/docker/overlay2/b65306d13897bc20549e7177d32274e54ad1d57c3f58c1125fc28a7d9b33cd19/merged overlay 301G 267G 20G 94% /var/lib/docker/overlay2/b60b56a14ebea51138fb5e50058e78bde214217a285847eb46235405b8d965c8/merged
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
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RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
No description
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
Having trouble getting the logs
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RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
Logs (from Dockge)
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
I should note that all of this happened on 6/24/25 (later down in the logs)
Zeus
Zeus3mo ago
The storage size display is the total used on disk. Not just immich usage So to really figure out what’s going on you will need to dig into the folder level We also don’t recommend LXC so any weird issues we would recommend switch to a supported VM deployment Can you post your env file contents?
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
This issue seems to only happen when deleting things. Previously I had renamed a folder which had 300gigs of photos in it, so immich reprocessed (adding space) but never cleared the old space. Not sure how it being a LXC would impact its ability to reach from the storage space but thats beyond my technical capabilities
Zeus
Zeus3mo ago
Pretty massively. The storage interface layer for a LXC is tied into the host FS especially if using a pass through mount
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
Also the fact I deleted 4000 assets yet immichs external library metrics remain unchanged, is concerning Grsabbing the env stuff now
Zeus
Zeus3mo ago
Regardless, weird issues = recommend to use a VM
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
'# You can find documentation for all the supported env variables at https://immich.app/docs/install/environment-variables The location where your uploaded files are stored UPLOAD_LOCATION=./library The location where your database files are stored DB_DATA_LOCATION=./postgres To set a timezone, uncomment the next line and change Etc/UTC to a TZ identifier from this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones#List TZ=Etc/UTC The Immich version to use. You can pin this to a specific version like "v1.71.0" IMMICH_VERSION=release Connection secret for postgres. You should change it to a random password Please use only the characters A-Za-z0-9, without special characters or spaces DB_PASSWORD=PASS The values below this line do not need to be changed ################################################################################### DB_USERNAME=postgres DB_DATABASE_NAME=immich TZ=US/Eastern' Oops, that didnt post right (sorry) Host filesystem is ZFS by the way Immich server is on SSD (local-lvm). The external library is on ZFS (HDD)
Zeus
Zeus3mo ago
What is the absolute path of the library/ folder? Reading your post there’s a lot of half points of data. We haven’t really figured out what’s going on yet
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
I cant browse that easily so would need a few to get into the console to check
Zeus
Zeus3mo ago
I think you need to increase your logging / monitoring and figure out what exactly is growing / changing For all I know it could just be old docker images from upgrades
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
Only thing that is on this SSD is Immich, and nothing has been done to it for the last 1 week. Also the server space was checked moments before I began deleting the assets
Zeus
Zeus3mo ago
Ok, well we will still need to track the folder sizes to know the source It could be a lack of the FS being trimmed within the guest as well
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
Is that a function of the filesystem itself or Immich? (sorry I am not familiar with that)
Zeus
Zeus3mo ago
The FS Theres a lot of things that can go wrong to cause this that have nothing to do with immich
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
I see, I'm with ya So not that i would look forward to doing this but prior to moving this to the SSD I used to have both Immich and the External Library on the same FS (albeit still 2 locations as I didnt want my LXC backup, backing up 2TB everynight), but it would take the SSD out of the equation. I could spin the older immich LXC up, update it to latest Immich and bring over current DB. Would there be some benefit to doing any of that?
Zeus
Zeus3mo ago
No, i doubt the ssd is the issue I would start by monitoring the size nightly and see how it changes Either a cron job for ex
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
Was just thinking maybe the SSD specifically isnt trimming whereas the zfs may? I have been monitoring it, it hasnt increased this whole week until this deletion I did a few hours ago
Zeus
Zeus3mo ago
You can run trim in the lxc i think That you would have to google to research
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
I suppose there are 2 issues here. Why is it increasing is 1, but also why would removing 4000 photos not decrease it? The latter is what Im initially more concerned with
Zeus
Zeus3mo ago
Also would try to prune docker images 4000 photos is not much thumbs, and we dont even know if thats why it grew There are way too many possibilities right now to speculate. You need to bisect and identify the problem This is sysadmin stuff still, not immich issue yet
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
I just wish I knew more about linux lol. I will post on the proxmox forums and see if that gets me anywhere Im realizing that I think the increase in space is because of the Extract Metadata job. When its running the server space increases Also whats odd is when I click 'Rescan' on External Libraries job it shows Active 2, then 1, then finishes in like 20 seconds. Normally it would run through for a bit
Zeus
Zeus3mo ago
Theres been improvements lately to make it much faster How many external libs do you have? Can you share a screenshot?
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
Just one, sure
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
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Zeus
Zeus3mo ago
And no other users?
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
Oh ok, maybe its just that (the improvements). I havent really looked at the rescan timing in a good month or so Nope, just me
Zeus
Zeus3mo ago
Can you go into the LXC and run find /mnt/immich -type f | wc -l ?
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
I can see more logs, let me send this too. The bottom is when is hit RESCANE
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
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Zeus
Zeus3mo ago
You have many more files than you have external assets, why is that?
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
I dont know? Where are you seeing that? Is that a reference to where is checked 80332 assets? And my #s show around 70k?
Zeus
Zeus3mo ago
The find command has 102k assets or, files. could be anything
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
I think I may have mentioned but 2 mo ago, I renamed an ext library folder at the root level, so all of those files got reprocessed in immich (and the file size never went down). Im wondering if those files are now doubled on the immich server, which is in line with what im experienced. I think my old reddit post had some photo/vid qty #s let me check
Zeus
Zeus3mo ago
No, that wouldn't explain why the external lib itself has more assets immich doesn't write its thumbnails or anything to that volume
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
Oh sorry I misunderstand On the external library I do have folders that are ignored via the exclusions
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
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RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
Im guessing that is why, I can run a check to see how many files are in those folders
Zeus
Zeus3mo ago
ok, that probably explains it I don't think there is anything else to do for now. you should just start tracking the growth of various folders in the LXC, and maybe start preparing to switch to a VM because we really can't reproduce or accept bug reports on LXC, and I've never seen this before. I am fairly sure it is a server misconfiruation issue
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
If I do a VM, can I port my DB over and have it just work, or will I need to reprocess everything? I dread that because it will take a week or so Which VM OS do you suggest and version?
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
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RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
BTW looks like the 2 temp upload folders I use are about 25k files. These are excluded from processing in Immich
Zeus
Zeus3mo ago
Most of us use Debian 12 yes you can transfer
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
Ok thanks
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
I was finally able to get to the SSD via Samba. Heres what I found -Immich is showing server space is 272gig being used -Immich library is 235g (200g encoded video and 28gig thumbs, 7gig backups, 3gig postgress folder
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RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
Im checking the other folders outside of immich, I suppose it should be the difference of about 34gig. Not sure if that sounds high when this is a basic linux box with just dockge and immich on it
Zeus
Zeus3mo ago
I suspect you have old docker images yeah That seems a bit high
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
I dont mean to get too off the topic of immich (and will post elsewhere too) but I did see that the \bin (14gb) and \usr folder (17gig) show this weird nesting of folders a billion times
Zeus
Zeus3mo ago
Would depend on what exactly is in there
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
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RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
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RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
Sorry each seem to have these contents:
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
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RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
but its repeated so many times 40 levels its saying
Zeus
Zeus3mo ago
Thats weird. Not immich though Never seen that
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
Thanks, yeh maybe its the container like you said. Anyhow I appreciate you helping me today
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
Sorry one last thing, I see the \var folder looks what I believe to be references to the search model I use in Immich. Its showing as a whopping 100gig. Perhaps this is where the space is going
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RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
And Im so sorry for all the questions but considering a restore. There is no way I can just grab my library folders where immich resides and copy that from one server to another, with all the encoded videos and thumbs in tack so they dont need to reprocess? Or I have to trigger the dump and then ro then run the command? Just trying to avoid reprocessing all the encoded videos and thumbs
Mraedis
Mraedis3mo ago
If you use a DB dump then you should be able to just move the whole UPLOAD_LOCATION, yes @RoachForLife what other containers do you have running? Because that X11 nesting is just you putting env=env/X11 or something like that somewhere
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
Only other container I have is Album Auto Creator which is auto creates albums based on the folder of my nas. I see that X11 thing is on a few of my machines that use dockge so maybe its related to that. Ill have to check
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
I did find something new out though. So I had my older Immich box that lives on my HD (instead of this one that is on my SSD), which was current as of Feb so wouldnt require as much processing. But it was BEFORE I did this massive deletion of 4000 assets and before 2months ago when I renamed a root folder in my ext library causing immich to expand seeing it was 'new' because the path changed, but never recovered from. Anyhow I got it to the current version, used identical compose, imported my settings from the first immich, and it points to the same ext library. So its effectively identical. Let it run and now it has everything loaded. I ran TreeSize on both machines and the Immich folder has a 35gig delta. In this photo the top one is the original machine I posted on (SSD) and bottom is one I just reprocessed (HDD). 240gig vs 205gig
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RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
Also odd though, my External library numbers are actually quite a bit HIGHER on the new box than the old. I feel like these numbers arent getting reported correctly Old (SSD) is 64k photos, 6k videos New is 74k photos, 7k videos Double checked both immich, album creator, and dockge compose and env files, nothing like this in any of them
Mraedis
Mraedis3mo ago
Did you set DISPLAY in your ssh conf or something
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
??? I didnt but also not sure how or what that is? I can check if if you wouldnt mind assisting on where to go BTW further drilling into the differences of the 2 systems, the main diff is in the encoded-video folder (sorry I didnt post in screen above). But the old machine (ssd) is 202gig for encoded-video, and the new (hdd) is 165gig
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
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RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
I just checked /etc/ssh/ssh_config on one of the boxes and dont see anything about 'Display'. Only 5 are uncommented, PasswordAuth, Port, SendEnv Lang, HashKnownHosts, and GSSAPIAuth
Zeus
Zeus3mo ago
This is because your model-cache volume is set to null I have no idea why you would do that but I assume you’re forcing a new ML model to get downloaded to a new anon volume every restart
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
If Im doing it, its not on purpose 🙂 I did change my model like a month ago when you guys dropped some new ones but that was just thru the webui
Zeus
Zeus3mo ago
It’s in your compose. Compare the last lines to our compose on GitHub
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
ok thanks will check that now
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
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Mraedis
Mraedis3mo ago
Feel free to share the compose/env of your other containers and I'll take a quick peek to see if I can't spy the X11 madness
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
Yep I see that. So in the compose its just blank. Maybe dockge turned that into 'null'?
Mraedis
Mraedis3mo ago
Just remove the null part
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
Ok just did that on both instances, should that clear the data on its own or will I need to delete something manually?
Zeus
Zeus3mo ago
You should do docker volume prune -a
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
I wonder if that model cache has any relation to the 40 instances of X11 folder?
Zeus
Zeus3mo ago
No That’s all on you haha
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
dumb question, but could that docker volume prune -a be the missing link from my original question as to why files werent being removed? Not sure if you saw my last image but I reprocessed on a new serer with identical settings and ext library and the encoded vid folder is 40gig diff
Zeus
Zeus3mo ago
No, that shouldn’t need to be run in a normal install
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
ok im going to do more treesize comparisons between each of these steps to document any changes it does
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
Ran the command but saying reclaimed 0B
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RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
Maybe a different command i should be running? running docker system prune now instead, total server space is decreasing. ill ping back when done
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
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RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
@Mraedis thanks. Here is Immich yamls and thd one for Dockge. Thats only stuff I have on my system. Thanks for looking over
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
@Zeus After that prune system my var folder went from 100gig to 24gig. Sweet. No change in the Immich folder but I guess that was expected. Odd that this folder went down 75gig but it only reclaimed 25gig from the msg
Mraedis
Mraedis3mo ago
nothing special in the composes, what about grep -rni ~/.config/ -e X11 does that yield anything ?
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
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Mraedis
Mraedis3mo ago
And without the .config part?
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
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RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
on the x11 thing, I came across this, apparently its from a package? https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/12670/how-to-cleanly-remove-x11 Side note, I got WinMerge and Im comparing the immich library folder for both machines to see where the differences are. Then maybe that will help identify whats going on
Mraedis
Mraedis3mo ago
No that's not what it's from Your problem is you have something copying your X11 to X11
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
Oh gotcha, shrug... Going back to the original issue, still feels like something odd is happening here. When I compare the Immich folders, where the settings are identicial and source is identical, it produces 2 difference folder sizes, partricularly on the encoded video folder. Earlier, Zeus was pointing to the fact I am using a LXC in proxmox which is likely the issue. I just wonder if there is more to it.
Equally the fact that me deleting items from my ext library is not updating the library metrics in the immich webui. All of it feels off, like something isnt happening in the background to refresh things properly
Zeus
Zeus3mo ago
We still don't have any more info than before to say this i s due to immich but I think it's time to swithc to a VM if it's still frustrating you
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
I will be doing that at some point. Just unsure how (if I were on a VM), how you would even troubleshoot this
Zeus
Zeus3mo ago
well, first of all your LXC has other issues unrelated to immich confounding the issue but you still haven't done what we asked which is to identify exactly what folder is growing and when
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
Throwing another idea out there. So you saw the other day I have 2 of my own upload/temp style folders, which is about 1tb in raw data. This is excluded from Immich via external library pattern exclusion. The workflow I go thru is I dump new photos into these photos (plus a lot of old ones I havent sorted yet) and then move into the other ext library folders where immich picks them up. Is it possible that im working in an excluded folder and then into immichs folders, its doing something weird with them?
Zeus
Zeus3mo ago
no, that should be fine
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
I mean its the qty of folders in the encodedvideo folder its just there are more of them If i have 2 systems, referinging the same data source, same everything, and one has 165gig of encodedvideo folder and one has 205gig of encodedvideo folder, doesnt that show something isnt right?
Zeus
Zeus3mo ago
depends on your settings for video encoding
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
i imported the settings from system 1 to system 2 so they should be identical, no?
Zeus
Zeus3mo ago
You're making so many assumptions, mate the exclusion patterns could differ.. the settings could differ.. certain files could be visible or not in each system
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
How could any of the settings differ if i exported from system 1 and imported to system 2?
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
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RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
Difference in the encodedvideo folder. Left is SSD and right is the new one on HDD 37k files vs 21k files. Same ext library data source,
Zeus
Zeus3mo ago
I am not sure. We don't have any known bugs regarding this. deleted files are only purged after 30 days typically
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
SSD
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RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
HDD
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RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
Ok so maybe I truly just need to wait Maybe some consideration could be given to having a job or a way to force the deletion ad hoc?
Zeus
Zeus3mo ago
you can always delete the full encoded video folder and re encode and see what happens
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
I do recall when I first had this issue 2 mo ago, a dev on reddit said the 30 days, but 30 days later, there was no change. even 60 days later, no change Yeh but that would take forever but I guess youre right TBH the reason im making all these posts is less to fix my issue (although of course I care about it) but I want to understand it and if its a bug its something that the dev group could fix long term. This has come up a few times as I have either deleted things in bulk (using dupe finder in windows) or the one time i had to rename a root folder in my ext library (changed the name slightly) which also caused this. I realize Im not on a VM and that may be the whole thing, just feels like more to it In the example Im comparing i have effectively started over like you suggested and the results show a 10k file difference between the two. Something tells me if i deleted the encodedvideo folder and start over Id end up at 21k videos, simiilar to what i have on system #2 (HDD) i referenced Is this at all a possibility? Unsure why youd make folks wait a week if they wanted to run it immediately? or give someone a script or a job to run to do this?
Zeus
Zeus3mo ago
I'm not sure, I don't work on that part of immich. You can open a feature request if you want, if it doesn't already exist
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
ok thats a good idea Not to go on a tangent but you just made me think of something, and something i posted on reddit the other day, maybe you might know. Motion photos. Immich takes a motion photo and splits that between the photo and the video, is that correct? If say, I didnt want any motion photos to be stored (and had 50k of them lol so doing them on the phone didnt make sense), could I just delete the corresponding encodedvideo, or would immich fail?
Zeus
Zeus3mo ago
you can always delete encoded videos you just might have to re encode them, yep
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
Hmm, maybe the FR will be to ignore motion photo encodedvideos when transcoding. Not sure if that would be possible but that might work Do you know if I were to just delete a motion photos encodedvideo, would it still function in the webui if not re-transcoded? Like would it give an error or like an icon that i couldnt see the photo until the transcoding happened?
Zeus
Zeus3mo ago
I'm not sure tbh. it definitely can't play it but I do not know how it would show up
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP3mo ago
ok fair enough thanks again for the help and info!
Zeus
Zeus3mo ago
sure, let us know if you find out more
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP2mo ago
@Zeus So someone on another thread suggested (i think you more or less did the same) to turn transcoding OFF, process everything, and see if any files are left over in the encoded videos folder. So I did that and 113gig still remain. I would have thought this would have dropped to 0 if encodedvideo was off (and using external library). Here is the before and after disabling transcoding
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP2mo ago
No description
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP2mo ago
ALso at this point, can I delete the contents of encoded-video and turn transcoding back on and reprocess everything?
Mraedis
Mraedis2mo ago
You can always delete everything inside encoded-video, except for the .immich file, if you then trigger encode on all @RoachForLife 🙂 (by always I mean it won't break your immich install... a lot)
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP2mo ago
Won't break it a lot lol. I'm definitely planning to do this later today and let it run overnight. I have lime 10k videos and know it will take some time to process. I guess I'm wondering if there is also anything I can be doing to help the immich team with troubleshooting this issue and why it's not recovering space. Leaving behind 113gig of encoded videos (which is about half of my previous folder size) seems like something is really not working with Immich and how it operates with people using external libraries. It's not cleaning up after itself if a file is moved (or renamed in my case) My case may be a bit more edge as this mainly is due to me renaming the root folder for my daughter which has about half of all the videos of my entire system (she about 4 so as you can imagine we take way too many pics and vids) but still, I'd love to see this issue be corrected so reprocesinf the entire thing is not needed. If, based on where I'm at in the process, can help immich in some way, please let me know Going back to your suggestion, I see there is one sub folder in encoded video which is some sort of guild, and then a million sibfolders under that. I imagine that guid looking folder needs to stay intact too?
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP2mo ago
No description
Mraedis
Mraedis2mo ago
that's all normal yes I'm not toooo sure the guid folder should stay intact 🤔 but everything under it should be throwaway
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP2mo ago
yeh that was my plan, thanks. Im making copies of the current state of files in case I can be of help later When you say this is normal, so immich should not be deleting the encoded videos (and photos) of assets that move in the ext library? IE video was in daughter\folderXYZ and then folderXYZ renamed to \daughter\folderABC, forcing immich to reprocess the video in ABC. Shouldnt it delete the missing reference in XYZ? Before when I had Immich on a spinning HD and had 40tb of space to use, I never gave it a thought. Now I have it on a 500gb NVME drive the space used by immich is more critical. I would think/hope that immich would be smart enough to release the file no longer is there (it does put it in the trash and throws a huge red banner saying its missing) to then delete the corresponding photo and video in its library after, no?
Mraedis
Mraedis2mo ago
It should keep them for 30 days in the trash If you empty the trash it should clear out the old encodes
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP2mo ago
It's been 3mo since I did this change. Still there
Mraedis
Mraedis2mo ago
I did say should
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP2mo ago
I had emptied the trash right after doing it as well. One thing to note, hitting empty trash does not remove these missing references from the trash. If for example I deleted things via immich (so not moving in the ext library but straight up deleting) and also move some in windows. I then have a mix of 2 types of trash files. One that deletes something and one that is a missing reference... Clicking empty trash will only process the ones for deletion. The ones with the bad reference remain To delete those I have to select all and then click the delete button (in trash page) Not a big deal but I'm wondering if the fact it's separated like that has any linkage to this And to my main point, the "should" part you just said is what I'm hoping the immich dev team can research and fix so it's a "always" instead of "should". And again, I'm happy to assist if needed I suppose an idea might be some sort of job that can run (scheduled or even manual) to scan the ext library and compare to the dB and library files and delete any orphaned files.
Mraedis
Mraedis2mo ago
I wonder if the issue here is that it deleted all references from the DB after you changed the path and it also cleared the 'pending deletes' in the trash 🤔
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP2mo ago
@Mraedis Yeh perhaps. I wonder if because I went to the trash, selected all and hit the delete icon in the trash, if that messed things up? Maybe I just truly need to wait? Would seem odd but just a guess as to what caused this from deleting itself. In my case I wanted to reclaim my space right away. I'm guessing that potentially a lot of people could be affected by this (not deleting its files in the library I mean) since on reddit, i feel maybe half of the users use via an external library (based on a few polls ive seen and comments). Anyhow, I've brought this up several times in the past 3 or 4 months but now have more 'proof' if you will. Is this something that can be escalated to the dev team to look into a bit more? The hopes are simply to make Immich a better product as I plan to use this for a long long time
Mraedis
Mraedis2mo ago
I'll see if I can reproduce it 🙂
RoachForLife
RoachForLifeOP5w ago
Thanks bud, I appreciate @Mraedis No pressure but just for my own reference. Would this ticket be the best place for any future updates or findings you come across? Possibly related but I have another ticket about 'reprocess specific transcoded video' and another admin said that there are mp4 files (which are set to not transcode) in the db. Possibly related?
Mraedis
Mraedis5w ago
I totally forgot after realizing I don't have an easy external library in my test setup 👀

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