How to deal with Immich & Google's Photos app combo?
Hi, so I'm bringing in my girlfriend to also use Immich, but there is a big problem. She has a oneplus phone, so the default photos/gallery app that is used is the Google's photos app. Problem is, that that app's albums are not actual albums on device, just some albums on cloud (or so a quick Google search about this problem tells me). So any albums she creates are not seen by the Immich app, and backing up albums is just not possible. Only album that can be selected for backup in the Immich app is the whole camera roll..
This is a huge deal breaker right now. Because right now, how we're trying to use immich is not to upload everything, but just select photos. And easy way to select is to make albums and move select photos to an album that is backed up. Worked great for me on my Samsung phone.
Any suggestions on how to deal with this? Sure could download some alternative gallery app on her phone that actually makes albums on device, but I'm sure you can imagine that it is far from ideal and a tough sell to say "oh yeah, manage your photos on these two separate apps in addition to taking this new Immich app into use".
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:wave: Hey @Ox,
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If this ticket can be closed you can use the /close command, and re-open it later if needed.You can export your entire library from Google Photos and import them to Immich (using immich-go for example), which will also recreate the right folders etc. But there is no syncing. She will have to make the switch to Immich and create the albums and any other maintenance there, and treat the uploads to GP merely as a backup
yeah, this is unfortunately not a solution at all. managing albums with immich means all the images would already be on immich. but use case I'm looking for is backing up just certain albums to immich
I guess basically what this means is that oneplus users are unable to use immich properly without taking some 3rd party gallery app into use. that is quite a downside
I'm not an Android user at this moment, but isn't Oneplus simply using android, which has its own photo/gallery storage and uploads to GP on top of it? If you're managing the folders on the phone itself you can select in Immich which folders you want to sync and wether to keep the folder structure intact.
to me it seems that on oneplus google photos is the default. dont have my girlfriend's phone here right now to verify. but at least she only uses google photos to manage photos (local ones as well).
and yeah, I use samsung and its default gallery app is really good and albums are actually locally on the phone and immich sees them just fine, and and I can back up certain albums just fine.