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Comment by ivanjermakov

4 days ago

Beware that migrating back from Immich to iCloud/Google is not something Immich cares about. There is no "download all" anywhere, best way is to go to the server and get raw files from there.

https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/14365

They’re literally on a disk drive I can physically touch. I think I can figure out a migration strategy for that.

  • It's tricky with iOS. Plugging iPhone into a server is stupid. Adding server as a network storage in Files app is smarter, but downloading photos this way does not guarantee deduplication. Would be great if Immmich iOS app had a restore functionality as convenient as existing backup functionality.

    • You migrate from the server, not the client. You seem confused about what Immich is.

  • The immediately obvious and simple to handle on-disk format for everything I cared about was one of the things that convinced me to give it a try. Well-crafted exporters are great and all, but I really like being confident that I can convert it by hand even if the company ceases to exist.

    Backups are easy too: you can very reasonably just rsync the library folder, and it'll be recoverable from that alone (I tried it! Worked great). You'll lose accounts and image-content search and iirc faces (possibly painful), but most of that is trivially rebuilt or not very interesting for single-person scenarios.

what do you mean download all? its your server over your files. If you want them, go get them! Or just point google / apple / whatever upload at your library directory.

A download button would be great but the files are already stored on the device you can copy them with a usb or go on the device and upload it directly.

There’s no download all in apple photos either unless they added it

  • Yes, that's even more stupid! Best way to export photos from iCloud if you don't have mac is to use iCloud from the browser and bulk download from there, but it has a 10k files-per download limit! It also doesn't allow you to select all and partiton download this way, I had to manually increase selection until it's 10k and remember where I started.

  • And yet, the same is true for Apple photos about ease of export:

    If you set the pref to keep originals locally, they're all on your drive, in original form, as well as the derived versions including caches of raw to jpeg, resolutions, and edited versions.

    That said, Apple Photos does let you export even if only in cloud. Open the library, select all, and File > Export ... > Export Unmodified Originals.

    It pauses for a second or two on my quarter million images, but is then happy to comply.

Maybe I'm missing something but the linked discussion has a link to a closed issue that links a PR that added the feature you say is missing.

I put all my files in a folder. I’d simply get them there. No concern about this at all.