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Immich

Not only can it replace Google Photos like yesterday but if you were like me your backups for photos are abysmal and is just folder dumps and .zip's of every old phone, laptop, USB stick, SD card, Download folder, meme folder.

Not looking forward to sorting this

A daunting task to track down image doubles, sort every image, and figure out what was important enough to keep. I had no idea where to start.

Problem

I have been dumping photo's into unstructured folders and backups for YEARS. We are talking backup, backup-new, backup-final, and tons of random folders dumped into one another 😅. This will be brutal to sort through and I really want to start using Immich to manage my photos. Wait, why not USE Immich, to sort images FOR Immich?

Solution

Create a burner user that you will upload each backup folder too. This user account will be used to meta-sort your photos. Why don't we just upload everything to your user and sort there? Immich loads ALL images into the timeline, so even as you select images to move into photo albums, the main timeline is still full of everything. This gets REALLY hard to know what you've selected and haven't.

  1. Create burner user
  2. Begin to upload one, two, or three directories depending on their volume
  3. Sort all these photos into albums
  4. Download those as .zip (Give them category names like dogs, vacation, meme, wallpaper)
  5. Delete all the photos with this user
  6. Start again at step 2 and repeat until all photos are sorted

You should now have a few .zip's of your stuff with incrementing numbers (dogs0.zip, dogs1.zip, dogs2.zip). You can now use your actual Immich user to upload these somewhat sorted .zip folders.

Wrap It Up

This allowed me to start with a user who has structured albums to help stay organized moving forward. I also ended up with a completed folder of old desktop wallpapers, plymouth boot art, grub art, and stuff I thought was lost. I had literally thousands of duplicate photos all caught during upload and was left with a tidy 637 unique photos that I actually cared about.