Preserve metadata when moving/renaming files (prevent unnecessary re-scanning)

[spnchik]

I have searched the existing feature requests, both open and closed, to make sure this is not a duplicate request.

• Yes

The feature

Preserve metadata and ML results when moving/renaming files (prevent unnecessary re-scanning)

Currently, when I reorganize my storage and move files or rename folders within External Libraries, Immich treats these as entirely new files. It removes the old database entries and creates new ones. This causes a massive unnecessary load on the server because it re-runs all background jobs from scratch (Thumbnail generation, Face Detection, CLIP, OCR) for files that were already fully processed. Furthermore, any manual adjustments (like corrected faces or edited metadata) are permanently lost.

It would be great if Immich could recognize when a file is simply moved or renamed.
A possible solution could be checking the file hash (checksum) or file size/modification date during the library scan. If Immich detects a "new" file but its hash matches a "deleted" or "missing" file, it should simply update the file path in the database instead of dropping the asset and triggering the entire ML pipeline again.

Currently, the only alternative is to strictly avoid moving files after they are scanned, which is highly impractical for managing large existing archives or external storage arrays.

Maybe Immich should store metadata for "deleted" files for at least one full rescan iteration.

Platform

• Server
• Web
• Mobile

[fabiocatalao]

There is a similar discussion here: #16394

[bo0tzz]

Dupe of #16394