I’ve been self-hosting Nextcloud for a couple of years, mainly for photo sync from my and my wife’s iPhones.
Recently, I decided to give Immich a try. Built the stack, configured everything, set up Nginx and DNS, and used immich-go to migrate all our existing photos from Nextcloud.
Everything looked great. I was genuinely impressed with Immich.
Then we enabled backup on the iPhones.
Holy shit.
Immich started trying to upload thousands of photos that were already in the library. Same photos, already migrated, already sitting there — yet Immich wanted to upload them again.
I spent hours digging through GitHub issues, Reddit and documentation, thinking I must have missed some setting.
Nope.
Apparently, this basic use case still isn’t properly handled.
What makes it even more frustrating is that Nextcloud, despite being much slower and needing a lot of tweaking, handles this workflow perfectly fine for us.
The workaround seems to be moving existing photos into an album and excluding that album from backup. That’s technically possible, but it’s a ridiculous workflow compared to simply letting the app figure out what has already been uploaded, or at least an option to choose the date.
Honestly, after all the hype around Immich, I expected much better handling of something as fundamental as this.
So yeah, my Immich honeymoon lasted about a day. 😂
Luckily, I didn’t delete my Nextcloud data.
Back to Nextcloud for now.
Maybe I’ll give Immich another shot when this gets properly sorted out.
Source: r/immich · by /u/techexpat