Mobile album sync of duplicated images in multiple folders not working

[EinToni]

I have searched the existing issues, both open and closed, to make sure this is not a duplicate report.

• Yes

The bug

After checking that the images from the phone of my wife got synced correctly I noticed that the albums did not get synced. After turning on the album sync and starting that it still did not sync the albums.

Reason is that on (at least android) mobile devices, albums are basically folders. To create more albums she therefore copied (not moved!) a lot of images from the main "camera" folder to other "album" folders. I would have expected that these also get synced correctly into their remote albums despite being duplicates of the main image. But I guess the mobile app just disregards them as being duplicates.

It would be great if duplicate images in different local albums on a mobile device would also get synced and put in these multiple albums on the immich server. I don't know if this is a new feature request or a bug, but to me it feels like a bug.

The OS that Immich Server is running on

Docker

Version of Immich Server

1.131.3

Version of Immich Mobile App

1.131.3

Platform with the issue

• Server
• Web
• Mobile

Your docker-compose.yml content

Not needed. Server runs great!

Your .env content

Not needed. Server runs great!

Reproduction steps

1. Have an image on your mobile device and let it upload.
2. In the gallery of the mobile device, copy the image into another album (not in immich!)
3. Activate the backup for that album.
4. Hit "synchronize albums".

=> Expected result would have been that the image (despite being a duplicate) gets synched into the new album in immich.

Relevant log output

Additional information

No response

[alextran1502]

Hit "synchronize albums".

Can you provide the screenshot of where you pressed this button? I just want to double check

[EinToni]

Sure, this one here:

[EinToni]

Just for further information, immich does create the album, but it does not contain the duplicated image.

[alextran1502]

Yeah, I think this should be a feature request instead of a bug report. Since the synchronization is based on the upload candidates, which do not contain duplicate assets

[EinToni]

But this is a quite common use case when users organize their albums locally. I know a few friends who do this.
Will this be contained in the future rework of the mobile sync #16851 ?

[EinToni]

I did a bit of further digging and wanted to update this in case someone stumbles upon this in the future.
The sync of duplicated images in multiple albums is actually possible and indirectly implemented although with one requirement:

The album that shall be synched has to exist and the sync of the albums has to be active before the duplicate gets backed up the first time. Because when backing up the first time it actually adds the duplicated image to the remote album.

Only when activating the album sync after the duplicate got already backed up (meaning it got detected as duplicate and added to the ignored list) the album sync wont add it to the album as it will be filtered out in the next sync.

=> Workaround: When selecting an album to be synched that already contains older duplicated images, go to the settings and clear the detected duplicates. This way all of them will be reuploaded and the album successfully synched. When adding new duplicated to the album afterwards it will sync them normally.

[bo0tzz]

Is this still happening on the new beta timeline?