Changing Phones and Keeping Local Photos
Hi,
Immich has been working amazingly for me and I will be keeping it when I get a new phone next week.
My current setup is I have immich backing up the default DCIM folder from my phone.
I also use syncthing to backup these photos to my laptop and NAS so they live outside immich too.
When I get my new phone I was planning on keeping this setup, and copying all my existing photos to the default DCIM folder on the new phone so I have all my photos locally.
I guess my question is has anyone tried this and how would immich behave? Will it attempt to re-upload all the photos and I'll end up with duplicates?
Could I possibly copy the app state over so it knows what it has indexed already?
I could always have syncthing as send only mode to backup new photos from my new phone but then I'll lose the ability to look up old photos when offline.
Worst case can always nuke and repave and reindex everything!
Thanks as usual for all the amazing hard work that goes into the project!
3 Replies
Definitely someone more knowledgeable will be able to answer properly but from my experience I believe the app will be able to tell that they're the same photos based off the metadata embedded into the photos so when you move onto your new phone and point the immich app to your DCIM folder, it won't reupload anything since it's already saved.
Out of curiosity, are you using syncthing to copy over the original photos from the UPLOAD_LOCATION on your sever?
So I think the current situation when change phone would show you local assets as duplicated since the device is different. The next release will start having client hashing to overcome this exact situation
I assume you are going to transfer local assets from your old device to the new one?
Ah I see you mentioned that above
I use syncthing to sync to laptop and a folder on my NAS. Not to the immich upload location directly - I use the immich app on my phone to back them up to immich
Thanks for clearing that up. Didn't get my phone today so probably won't be switching for 2-3 weeks as I'm away for a bit so hopefully client side hashing will be there in time!
Yeah I will just copy them across when I setup the new phone.
Cheers for your help 🙂