Import existing folders without duplicating files
For many years I've organized my camera's raw photos by sticking a day or event into a folder called
2023-07-22 Event Name and I have hundreds of those folders in my NAS's Photography folder. I'd like to keep that folder structure, and ideally it might be nice to have each folder become albums within Immich. But I don't want to copy every photo out of this folder and into the separate Immich library, I want to just have Immich reference these as part of its library. (Others that I upload directly from the web UI can live elsewhere, I don't care about that, I just want to keep this existing organization structure without saving duplicate copies of all the files— 4.5 TB in total.) Is there a way to do this?5 Replies
I think —album flag may also work with import
Thanks. I haven't read all the details on that page but I wouldn't assume that "read-only gallery" is what I'm necessarily looking for based on its name. I'd think that prevents me from deleting or modifying the metadata on images, for example; when I'd like it to allow that from within the Immich UI but it should just probably not modify the actual photos on disk (although I'd actually be ok with it deleting the ones I request be deleted).
I did also run into this section when searching the docs but I'm also not sure if it's what I am looking for:
It’s the same thing, the other link i sent is just more detailed