Hey all, I did check for an immich sub first, but you smart people seem to be my only option now reddit has banned me for refusing to give them an email address.
Background: So, I have a Ugreen DH2300 NAS it runs a cut down version of debian. I've got docker running on it, which is happily hosting Jellyfin. Basic config of the drive volume is from root I have a docker tree and also a data tree. Immich & Jellyfin under docker, movies pictures tvshows books under data. I have pictures indexed by Jellyfin and it works but it isn't great. I have a vanilla copy of immich up and running, I can upload via web browser a pic at a time. The vanilla config puts those files in ./volume1/docker/immich/library/upload/very-long-random-number-directory
Where volume1 is the mounted displayed nas volume (from the nas host it's /mnt/volume1 if you ssh in)
Problem:
I have a terabyte of pictures under ./volume1/data/Pictures that is not visible in docker
Importing 1 by 1 via web browser is obviously not ideal. It also copies the set of pictures from one directory on the NAS volume to a duplicate under library/upload - not great for space.
I've seen the CLI tool exists and if I ssh into the NAS I can see the /Pictures directory as well as the docker/immich/library etc directory but it also has the downside of duplicating all the photos into the immich directory
Ideally I'd like to just index it like jellyfin does when you add files to movies or tv shows. I can't seem to even find a way to point the docker instance to the folder (i modified the .env file but it ignored it, so obviously got that wrong).
Is this the only way ?
EDIT Thank you all for the quick responses - I somehow managed to break the container altogether, so I'll reinstall from scratch and then add your suggested "external folders" config and see how I go.
Thanks again
You can add a folder to Immich as an external database. I didn't want Immich to upload in the way you describe, so I stopped Immich auto upload and use a different solution to upload files onto my NAS in a normal folder structure and date/naming system. Then Immich just scans these folders every 6 hours to add photos into the library. This external folder is added in volumes under immich-server and immich-machine-learning. It has been working fine so far.