get a good Upload-Workflow on Immich

[Horscht0815]

First, sorry for that, that the topic title is a little bit confusing and my post a little bit long. But I wanted to explain whole situation at the beginning.

This post is about my own workflow and the one who immich does. Means, in the past, before I had immich, I collected all my photos in a directory structure with namingconvention which fits for me. For the upload I copy the files (nevertheless if it's a mobile phone, camera or photos which I received from sombodyelse) into a "working"-folder. After modifying and (file-)name changing I sort them into the corresponding folder. In the past I already did face detection with other tools. But every result was stored for each photo inside the embedded metadata.
After I decided to use Immich for presenting, accessing and searching for photos I added the directory as an external library (as readonly). I want, that the pictures are kept untouched from the immich side until I'm sure to stay with Immich. In the past I tested a lot of other picture management software and after a while using it it turned out that they aren't that, what I wanted.

So for the Upload process my idea is. I will use the upload folder from immich including the upload feature in the mobile app to get all uploaded photos in one place. After that, I would like to continue, like in the past. Means, modifing the filename, doing some modifications and moving them into the folders which are mounted as external library.

Now I have some question in connection with:

1. Does this manual moving and modifying generates problems on the immich side?
2. Is immich generating the hashvalues for each file (to prevent duplicates when the same file is uploaded again) right after uploading into the upload folder?
3. If yes, does immich still keep this value, even after I moved (modified) the file into my folder structure and still detects, if this photo is uploaded again?
4. Does this whole Uploading Workflow on my side make any sense or do you have a better way?

Why I do all this? I want to prevent to get locked in into immich when it turns out after a while, that immich isn't the right tool for me and I have to export/migrate all my stuff.

Every advice is welcome.

Thank you in advance for your support.

Cheers

Hank

[mmomjian]

We do not, in any way, support editing, moving, or deleting files from the Immich upload library. We also do not have any duplicate checking against external libraries. As such, your plan would not work.

Immich stores all the originals on disk, and you can configure the organization via the storage template. I recommend you use that.

[Horscht0815]

Ok, understood. But, just in case, when I want to migrate away from immich, is it possible to do an export of all?

[mmomjian]

You already have all the originals on your hard drive. What would an export look like?

[Horscht0815]

Yes you're right. For the files itself it's ok. But for all the other additional information which I made. For example, like I said, I already spend a lot of hours/days in the past to do the face recognition and the revalidating of the output of the automatic tagging. I also added a lot of keywords, locations and descriptions to the fotos. In the past, I always was aware, that every information isn't stored in a local database (or isn't just stored in a local database only) than its saved back to the file (exif metadata). By the way, that helped a lot for the face recognition in immich, because immich imported these infos.
So, long story short. My itention is, when I move away from immich, I would like to get out much as possible of my "work" what I've done in immich. You understand what I mean?

[bo0tzz]

Many metadata edits are already stored in an .XMP sidecar; for anything that could be but currently isn't, making it so that is stored too is a longer term goal.

[Horscht0815]

Thank you bo0tzz for your advice.