[Feature]: preserve album info from upload client

[dorianim]

Feature detail

When uploading many photos which are already sorted into albums locally, it would be nice to have those albums copied to the server so that the photos don't have to be sorted again.

Platform

Mobile App

[alextran1502]

This can be reword as backup and preserve album info from mobile device

[tvlpirb]

I believe this would be one of the most important features for mobile use case. Most mobile users have multiple albums locally, being able to sync all while preserving album info on initial and subsequent sync is expected behaviour. Otherwise the gallery becomes a disarray with the current behaviour.

Would such a feature be easy to implement? Similar to how the CLI tool can choose which album to sync to. If not, what are some of the issues with implementing it if someone were to make a PR?

[lynrayy]

subsequent sync is expected behaviour.

tvlpirb Yes!

[zackpollard]

I'm not sure how easy this would be to do, might be possible on iOS, but on android the amount of different gallery and camera apps might make this problem far too vast.

[dorianim]

Well, on Android, you select albums for backup and those albums should be preserved

[Txxicer]

Great feature, but not only in mobile device, if this function would be available in combination with Ticket #34 this would be great!

[mind-overflow]

definitely a +1 for this.

it's super useful if e.g. you want to upload both camera pictures and generally less important media that gets sent in group chats, but you don't want the camera roll to get all mixed up with those images.
it's currently impossible because even if you manually add all the uploaded pictures to the "camera roll" album, every time you take a new one you have to manually add it and that just gets tiring imho.

[tvlpirb]

What is the update on this feature?
For anyone else interested in this, a current workaround this issue is to make a script which uses the CLI tool and puts everything in an album using the --al option

[2600box]

Could you explain a bit more detail about using your workaround method? Thanks!

[tvlpirb]

I've actually moved on and just settled with nextcloud with manual album tagging. However, previously what I did was sync the files to my backup server, the backup server would then periodically use the immich cli tool to upload all media to my immich server. I made use of the --al option which puts the media in an album on upload either based of a given name or a parent folders name. You can figure out the rest and experiment.

If you're syncing the media to your server, only to then use the CLI tool to add to immich be wary that you're storing everything twice. So make sure to clean up automatically once its added to immich.

It might be possible to use the immich CLI directly from phone but I haven't attempted that.

[tvlpirb]

Suggestions to the UI/UX for this feature for anyone making a PR, if we had to implement this feature it would be nice to be able to choose which album a local one uploads to. In addition to this, the user should be able to choose whether it uploads to an album or not to maintain the current behaviour.

[p4block]

Without this I can't use Immich. I've imported using the CLI my albums (DCIM from pics from 2010 and onwards, Reddit memes, WhatsApp images...) but my phone will blindly upload everything untagged, despite knowing well from which album each pic is from.

Reasoning being that the merged timeline view is completely unusable, specific album views are needed to filter out the crap from groups etc and only view actual camera pics.

I even tried to game the system by creating a folder with the same name as the local folder on the server, but that ofc doesn't work 😆

[klaus1k]

Same here - immich is so mature right now, I will use it in production right away once this feature is implemented.
I wish I could contribute a PR to help the team achieve this, but sadly I not a programmer :/

[shant1010]

WOW this is such an important feature request! I can't add albums manually through the app either because it just brings up the entire Immich library.

[Jamminroot]

I unknowingly wrote a duplicate for the original post of the discussion.
Here it is:

TL;DR: I'd like to be able to divide my uploads into folders and\or automatically assign albums to them

I've got a bunch of various folders on my phone: camera roll, some photos imported from GoPro, some photos in a separate folder based on the occasion (like "Vacation" or "Holiday Trip" etc.), bunch of memes to show my wife, screenshots, pictures from my work and others.
I'd like all of them to be backed up and be accessible, but the problem is that all of them get mixed into one flat collection, thus causing all them to be show in the same collection.

Now with any new onboarding to using the application user would get thousands of assets, all mixed into one collection. Assigning albums manually would be a problem - for both already uploaded assets, or every time one downloads a new funny gif\picture.

Also worth mentioning that when I download tv series, memes, work images or anything non-related to actual photos I take, It'd be great to be able to ignore all those irrelevant assets in face recognition: that would allow to reduce the resource cost on the feature, and "Face roll" would not be swarmed with faces of random ppl \ images (imagine having a face of a dear one somewhere in the end of the list, after a ton of irrelevant persons :) )

The only alternative I can have atm is to ignore everything but actual camera roll.

Hope that makes sense, and I really hope that it would be considered, as it is quite a painful downside for such a great tool.

[traktuner]

+1

My duplicate for reference:

#3932

[XRTce]

Just a bump on this feature as I believe it could be very useful to organize your pictures. The great majority is mainly managing their photos on their phone. So they likely already organized their assets into iOS or android albums thus preserving album information would be just the right thing to do. Regarding UI/UX I think it would be nice to manage this feature as opt in per album basis. For example I want all assets in my Birthday iOS album to be synced to the My Birthday album on server. I will then go to the sync tab in the app, select album sync, turn on album sync using a list view which came up showing all my albums and a toggle next to them. Additionally I can tap on the album name and edit the name of the album to which the photos should be synced on the server side. If the album does not exist it will be created

[2600box]

FWIW, this is one of the things holding me back and I guess it may be for many others too.

[Gecko-with-a-hat]

Yeah this is also the exact feature I am missing to start deploying Immich in my household.

[maslanypotwor]

This is a feature I am waiting for!
It would be the cherry on top that will push me to finally organize all my images (which are now a mess...) around Immich infrastructure.

[klaus1k]

Now that there is a storage template for {{albums}}, this feature is the last piece of the puzzle thats missing for me. The workflow should be working similar to the "album" flag of the CLI.

On mobile I select different albums right now: "Camera", "Lightroom", "WhatsApp", that I can backup to immich. Right now they do not adhere to the {{album}} storage template, because they are in no album for immich.
With that feature one could duplicate the folder structure AND the albums from mobile, which would be pretty awesome!!!

If that feature gets implement for external libraries as well, I soon am out of feature requests for immich! ;)

[nirmal-mewada]

Similar but slightly different, If this can be combined with #1687 to provide a generic way to "sync" local albums that can manage import and export, that would be very useful.

[maogongzi]

This is really a nice feature to have, I'm using Android, but for now I only choose the Camera album to be backup-ed, although I have some other local albums like "screenshots" which I would also like to backup. I used to backup some non-photo pictures, and later I have to manually sort them out one by one and add them to a new album, that's a huge load of time.

[Behem07h]

the app already lets us view images by album via the "Albums on Device" category of the "Library" tab, surely immich can at least use the library page for adding images to albums?

as a new user trying to get into immich, having to manually re-sort all images i backup is a huge drawback. People looking for a backup solution likely have hundereds of images already, surely you cant expect them to sort them all? In the effort it takes me to do that, I could go through the rest of the popular image backup solutions and find one that does it's job better.

Baffled how this is only "nice to have" when it should have been a key feature from the get go. how do we have a machine learning face detector but not this.

[moritzthecat]

this is excellent project - thanx

did setup the storage template to include album info and hoped it will preserve the iOS album info I used for the backup. {{album}}/{{y}}/{{MM}}/{{y}}-{{MM}}-{{dd}} {{HH}}-{{mm}}-{{ss}} {{filename}}
but this looks still in discussion ...

agree with other posts above that this is much more than nice to have

looking for a workflow to manage several iPhone photos
maybe a good idea to summarize intended use of immich and workflows as epics or use cases to discuss further, could be supported by voting

methods
import and which data shall be preserved - albums / folders could be 1st step
digital twin which can be worked on both ends
export and/or sync albums/folders to smartphone to avoid double sorting work

todays smartphones easily store more than 10.000 photos
just uploading without respecting existing meta data such as iOS albums or folders makes the solution less UX friendly

looking for a feasible workflow that includes a feasible way back to sync result of work to smartphone, again keeping meta data

think this could become a killer feature

[Skywalker8510]

+1

my duplicate for reference
#6627

[Konrni]

To bring the discussion a bit forward, what would be a good design choice to implement this?
Right now "CLI --album" does an album join after an upload. As far as i understand, this is triggered on every upload.
This looks like the way to go, so it's only called on new items and doesn't "lock" existing ones to an album.

UI wise i believe it should be a checkbox placed besides the album preview button on the select albums to backup page.

Extra:
Global additional "Album" in settings or beside "recent" (=all pictures)
Text-box instead of a checkbox. "Forced Album Name" would be stored locally. Could there be a way to store it on the server?

[Moosbee]

Yes, we are working on refactoring the mobile app backup and have that particular feature in mind as well with the refactor
osorin on Discord

[shant1010]

Im happy to see that this thread is still alive! This team has done some amazing work.

…

On Thu, Feb 8, 2024 at 10:41 AM lynrayy ***@***.***> wrote: Bump. Still actual. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#1678 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AKUIKQ32ZAUBSGLCRD4FZCTYSUL6FAVCNFSM6AAAAAAWHUMQ2OVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43SRDJONRXK43TNFXW4Q3PNVWWK3TUHM4DIMJRGEYTK> . You are receiving this because you commented.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[arrio464]

cool! Can’t wait to see this feature implemented!
This is exactly what I'm currently missing while using it.

[shant1010]

No, I can’t believe it lolOn Mar 1, 2024, at 10:04 AM, FlyingT ***@***.***> wrote: Damn, is this still not a feature? —Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or unsubscribe.You are receiving this because you commented.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[ThesiiNCey]

is this feature no implimented yet ?

[lgrawet]

No, unfortunately. This prevents me from using immich for phone sync.

[lynrayy]

@lgrawet

Same

[arrio464]

same😭

[dev-alto]

This would definitely increase QoL and allow me to ditch my built-in Photos app.

[manishmaharjan]

Indeed one of the highly important feature. Hope this feature will be out soon!

[baldsealion]

Are you serious, after all the configuration and setup, I can't sync photos with an album in iOS? Literally a dealbreaker until fixed sadly.

[BadCactus634]

Same. I just can't have all the photos that I care of, blended together with all the crap from Whatsapp, screenshot, documents and downloads... that will overload my server, as well as my connection.
I'll try uploading only the photos from my camera roll, the consequence is that this way, Immich will just be another app on my mobile phone, will not replace the Gallery app, until fixed.

[manishmaharjan]

Well, we all are desperately waiting for these features. However, personally I would prefer this #5409 folder view feature to be out as that would automatically bring this feature also along with it.