Internal Library for RAWs and Lightroom Classic
I'm in the process of setting up an Immich instance on an UnRAID NAS with the goal of having it be the one destination for all my pictures and those of other family members as well.
Thus, I have pretty much decided on using an internal library to be able to have all of Immichs perks and to be able to use Immich to sort and organise everything in one place.
When using my DSLM camera, I predominantly shoot in RAW and then subsequently edit and export with Lightroom Classic. I don't really use Lightroom for its organising/library features though. Since Immich is perfectly capable of working with RAWs, importing RAWs is fine.
The one thing I'm struggling a bit with right now is how to best work with those RAW files and export those that I edit back into Immich. I tried the Immich add-in for lightroom but every time I exported JPEGs into Immich it would move the RAWs into the trash and keep only the JPEGs in the library, which I absolutely do not want to happen.
Ideally, I would like to add Immichs folder structure (I use a custom storage template) into Lightroom Classic so I can directly edit the RAWs once uploaded through Immich (I understand that I would have to let Lightroom catch up every time Immich makes changes/adds/removes images). I would then export JPEGs locally and upload them to Immich, ideally having them stack. I am aware that making any changes to the internal Library is a bad idea, but I don't know enough about how Lightroom Classic works as to whether simply not using it to manage the library is sufficient.
Is this a reasonable approach or do I risk breaking things in Immich? Is there a better way that I am maybe missing? I'd really like to avoid having to duplicate all the RAWs just so Lightroom and Immich stay separate.
Thus, I have pretty much decided on using an internal library to be able to have all of Immichs perks and to be able to use Immich to sort and organise everything in one place.
When using my DSLM camera, I predominantly shoot in RAW and then subsequently edit and export with Lightroom Classic. I don't really use Lightroom for its organising/library features though. Since Immich is perfectly capable of working with RAWs, importing RAWs is fine.
The one thing I'm struggling a bit with right now is how to best work with those RAW files and export those that I edit back into Immich. I tried the Immich add-in for lightroom but every time I exported JPEGs into Immich it would move the RAWs into the trash and keep only the JPEGs in the library, which I absolutely do not want to happen.
Ideally, I would like to add Immichs folder structure (I use a custom storage template) into Lightroom Classic so I can directly edit the RAWs once uploaded through Immich (I understand that I would have to let Lightroom catch up every time Immich makes changes/adds/removes images). I would then export JPEGs locally and upload them to Immich, ideally having them stack. I am aware that making any changes to the internal Library is a bad idea, but I don't know enough about how Lightroom Classic works as to whether simply not using it to manage the library is sufficient.
Is this a reasonable approach or do I risk breaking things in Immich? Is there a better way that I am maybe missing? I'd really like to avoid having to duplicate all the RAWs just so Lightroom and Immich stay separate.
