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.
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Successfully submitted, a tag has been added to inform contributors. :white_check_mark: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.Making changes in-place to the files is also a bad idea You should probably use an external library
As I understood it, Lightroom Classic does not touch the original files though but rather saves the edit steps in the catalog (outside the immich library) and only generates a persistent edit when exporting.
If it's read-only to the entire immich folder/mount, it should not be a problem. I think that is not the case though. I am pretty sure it at least generates sidecar/xmp/companion files, even if not changing the original, which we would not support
Generating sidecars would be fine actually
Just need to run the job in Immich to pick those up
I am pretty sure we have said before that we do not support that even though it sometimes works
I believe there are edge cases (maybe if you edit in immich as well and it loses the other edits? not sure)
I think the answer has always been that any read/write to anything in UPLOAD_LOCATION "breaks" the warranty / may break based on future changes
that's fair, I guess it opens up a whole world of potential additional problems.
So as I understand things, it may work, it may not, I need to do some more reading up on it. And also I need to do some more reading on external libraries and whether their limitations would be fine for me or whether I'd rather risk it.
Alright, just tried setting the entire mount to read-only from the perspective of the system Lightroom is running on, seems to handle it just fine during a quick test and import into Lightroom. Thanks for the idea!
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