Synctrain photos sync feature with Immich: metadata and Live Photos

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Hi, I’d like to use Syncthing to get all my photos onto my server which will then use Immich.

My question is, will this support all photos metadata, and Live Photos? I know that Live Photos use a MOV file, and either a JPG/HEIC file, to create their effect. Will both of these be synchronized for each photo?

I imagine they would be if you could make that happen, but there might be restrictions placed by Apple on what is actually possible to sync.

Having said that, since Immich has Live Photos support, there must be some way of getting them there, even if not Syncthing…?

Okay, I just tested this with a single Live Photo, and it only copied an HEIC file and no MOV, so I think it may not be possible. There was an option in the Synctrain settings for Live Photos though?

All the metadata seem to have gone over fine.

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I don’t get it, Apple or Android?

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MOV, HEIC, and Live Photos are iOS/Apple. I used Synctrain to sync photos back to my computer and it seems like the metadata is all there. I synced a few photos back to my iPhone, imported them to the photos app, and was pleased to see the time, location info, and camera info all present. However, recognized faces had to be rescanned(which it did get eventually) and the live aspect was gone. @pixelspark said the photo sync is a relatively new feature to Synctrain and hasn’t had as much dev time as other sections of the app. It’ll likely be after Synctrain upgrades to Syncthing 2.0 before we start seeing more photo features.

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What’s the point of using Syncthing if you want to get your images into an Immich instance? Simply install the Immich app and that’s it?

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Okay thank you.

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I didn’t actually know Immich had a built-in upload function, I thought the user had to provide that, I’ve never used the software before.

The issue is, my photos are currently stored in iCloud, I was wondering if there was a way of directly uploading them without having to download them all at once, but it seems not.

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AFAIK there’s a CLI utility for bulk imports. But you’d still need to downloud them from iCloud first.

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I found that, and also this, but the download is the issue, yes.

However, after some more research, I found the “Download originals” option for iCloud Photos can download them to an external drive (which I do have space on), so I’ll try doing that.

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One final question: if the external drive is the one I’ll be using on my server to store the photos itself, I assume I don’t have to “import” them into Immich?

Or does Immich use some special format that I’m not aware of?

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Immich can handle external libraries. I think it’s a matter of preference how to handle this :person_shrugging:

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In case anyone is reading this in the future: the “Download originals” option does require you to download all the photos to internal drive first (it also removes edits), you can’t export directly to external drive with that option.

In my case I moved files off my internal drive to save storage, downloaded the photos, moved them to the external drive, then moved the files originally on internal drive back to internal drive. I used osxphotos which is amazing (also allows you to keep edits). Perhaps it is possible to do it without internal storage download with an alternate tool, like iCloud Photos Downloader may be able to?