Immich is really great, easily now my fav self-hosted app. I used the Immich CLI [0] and later Immich-go [1] to get all my photos in. That was a breeze. I set it to use the folders as albums... And now I have a lot of cleaning up to do, but other than with files and folders, I'm really enjoying the process!
A poweruser tip that has helped me a couple of times: Use ZFS (or other snapshotting facilities) to make snapshot before making any changes/updates or doing large imports. It makes the whole thing sort of bullet proof and you can retry if you're not happy with some import flag.
Immich had my old Corei3 server making a lot of noise for a couple of days btw! But, it's really good at facial recognition, not so much on finding dogs or something. But still very cool if you don't have to compromise on features as a self-hoster, I'm really grateful and will buy the "support package" (which does not add anything afaik... btw later they will come with a way to do seamless, encrypted off-site backups).
I just added an external folder and copied all my photos there. Even though Immich's own photos folder is just a directory with dates, Immich is much less picky about what goes in the external folder (and, more importantly, what disappears from it).
A poweruser tip that has helped me a couple of times: Use ZFS (or other snapshotting facilities) to make snapshot before making any changes/updates or doing large imports. It makes the whole thing sort of bullet proof and you can retry if you're not happy with some import flag.
Immich had my old Corei3 server making a lot of noise for a couple of days btw! But, it's really good at facial recognition, not so much on finding dogs or something. But still very cool if you don't have to compromise on features as a self-hoster, I'm really grateful and will buy the "support package" (which does not add anything afaik... btw later they will come with a way to do seamless, encrypted off-site backups).
[0] https://docs.immich.app/features/command-line-interface/
[1] https://github.com/simulot/immich-go