Immich v3.0.0 Released

7/2/2026 at 9:26:31 PM

Does anyone have any pointers on the best way to import roughly 14 Google takeout chunks into immich?

I've downloaded all the chunks once, only to find them corrupted due to... Their 50gb size and using a browser in theory. One also cannot seem to use wget or alternatives because of the auth / session cookies required via Google takeout.

I've yet to even broach the aspect of importing each giant bundle into immich because I've not had success in even grabbing the takeout files correctly, but would LOVE pointers on the best way of importing the roughly 700gb into the database without it ALL going wrong.

I've had great success with immich running in docker for the past year or so, although I have yet to upgrade to the newest version. Google photos backups have been disabled on my phone for a year or so, but I yet to haul in all of the past years.

Also, anyone know if I can get immich to upload the photos without... Running immich once in a while? Would be great if it just automatically sent them to "my cloud".

Great software.

by brewtide

7/2/2026 at 5:57:55 PM

There's a lot of things I spent a ton of time setting up, use once, and then never again. Tons of things that are easy to set up, and provide small benefits every day for a long time. Immich has got to be the thing that I've spent ages setting up, use extremely infrequently but the one time a year I use it I'm so happy I did. Great software.

by phikappa

7/2/2026 at 8:08:56 PM

Man, I wish my experience was as nice. I used the proxmox lxc for it and after a 2 months of organizing I had some corruption and didn't have the fortitude to get through the debugging. It might have been related to a big version migration if I remember correctly. It turned me off the stack. The upgrading wasn't as turnkey as I wanted it to be and I dont think the case is different today.

I just want to be able to organize my folders outside of some dumb library system and immich at the time fought that as well.

by nickthegreek

7/2/2026 at 9:18:05 PM

I'm not sure I will ever upgrade Immich again. When I upgraded to the next minor version (I forget which off the top of my head), the data migration corrupted my database such that no images would be served. Fortunately I had the old database backed up, so I restored it, rolled back to the older version of Immich, and things were back to normal. I like Immich, but this is not good for software that's beyond the first major version, and also handles archiving people's personal data.

by ravenstine

7/2/2026 at 9:16:29 PM

[dead]

by altran1502

7/2/2026 at 6:23:51 PM

[dead]

by prudhvis

7/2/2026 at 8:10:29 PM

Immich is an amazing software. I use it regularly as an alternative along side Google photos. I keep in it large videos that I wouldn't upload normally to Google photos + the snappy experience at home vs Cloud-Bades solution.

by MohamedMabrouk

7/2/2026 at 7:22:18 PM

I don't want yet another self hosted service to manage (update, backups, possible hardware failures, energy costs, ups, etc.).

Unfortunately Immich is not end-to-end encrypted. If that would have be the case i'd use https://pixelunion.eu/

Seems like a great app though. So... i'm still pondering what to do :-)

by DavideNL

7/2/2026 at 7:27:59 PM

Okay? So don't use it, use a managed service like Google Photos, Apple Photos, Dropbox, etc where your photos and files might be arbitrarily removed or your access to them limited while they are scanned for disavowed content.

You can also just use a secure transport layer (like WireGuard or a VPN) instead of relying on every project to implement end-to-end encryption.

by mcsniff

7/2/2026 at 8:21:08 PM

So if you don't want a self hosted service there are tons of cloud providers. Google photos, iCloud, etc. Some people don't want to pay a monthly fee to store their photos or don't want to risk losing something with sentimental value just because a company decides to ban you

by gonzalohm

7/2/2026 at 7:36:42 PM

You can use https://ente.com/ (it's open-source). It also makes the seemingly much better decision of storing photos in S3.

by Jhsto

7/2/2026 at 8:19:38 PM

The point of Immich is self hosting. Using AWS defeats that purpose

by gonzalohm

7/2/2026 at 9:19:31 PM

S3 has many open implementations you can self host. Some are quite lean even. Unless you need really complex IAM stuff it's a solid and rather simple experience to run it.

by jasonvorhe

7/2/2026 at 9:25:16 PM

Yeah but Immich provides a lot more features than just storage

by gonzalohm

7/2/2026 at 9:04:17 PM

Perfect is the enemy of the good. While there's an ideal case where you're hosting it on a box in your house, that's not for everybody. So while hosting it on AWS doesn't remove every dependency on big tech, at least it's not a full on Google hosted SaaS product.

by fragmede

7/2/2026 at 9:24:52 PM

I think "perfect is the enemy of good" is actually an argument against AWS integration. Using S3 as a backend is a lot more complex than using local storage so it would take a lot more time to implement, that's why local storage is good enough

by gonzalohm

7/2/2026 at 8:29:13 PM

+1 for Ente. Replaced Google photos for me

by buster

7/2/2026 at 7:31:27 PM

VPN (or other) Tunnel.

That's the objective answer. There's no mystery here. That's exactly how you get what you want and it's not too hard. Not trying to dunk on you or anyone one but this is an easily solved problem, and I think I want to highlight it like this to make sure everyone understands.

Anything web/internet/network service thing, you can add this on. This composability is important to remember in software, this even goes back to "The Unix Way" type stuff.

by jrm4

7/2/2026 at 9:21:36 PM

It's also a kind of funny thing how HN has the attitude of "never implement your own encrypted anything" but then demand their apps build in e2e encryption. It may be one abstraction higher, but it's still fundamentally the same problem. With the unfortunate exception of web browsers, if I'm going to use something that performs encryption, then I want encryption to be the only job it has.

by ravenstine

7/2/2026 at 7:23:53 PM

Does Immich support read-only source folders yet? I'd like to keep the original files intact, but allow Immich to index them.

by mopsi

7/2/2026 at 7:33:29 PM

Yes, at least for a year. There is a ”external library” feature, I think that does what you want.

by zyberzero

7/2/2026 at 7:55:02 PM

Thank you! That was not available the last time I checked.

by mopsi

7/2/2026 at 8:47:25 PM

It's been available for nearly three years

by bo0tzz