Replies: 19 comments 43 replies
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Hi there, thanks for the excellent guide! I'm encountering an issue at Step 6:
Any idea on a solution? It doesn't seem to be permissions related, but at the same time the language does suggest as much. |
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I reset my container and went through the guide again just in case I messed anything up or something went weird when I switched it from unprivileged to privileged, etc. I think I got the symlinks correct this time, they're showing up under the tree view now: 
Checking the permissions at /opt/immich/upload shows them as being owned by immich:immich now, but checking them at the mounted directory shows root:root, trying to chown the mounted (FileServer) directory doesn't change them from root:root. The storage backend is an SMB share hosted by a windows server which is added as a shared storage in proxmox, and then bind-mounted to the LXC. Do you think NTFS permissions might be interfering? 
It's still looping the "Failed to write" error and refusing connections |
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@Rakkzi you didn't say whether or not with this reset if the LXC is still privileged or if it's now unprivileged. If it's unprivileged you'll need to do some work in the LXC conf file with UID/GID mapping. If still privileged, then yes, I think NTFS might be related to the issue. Do you have any additional mount options set for the share in |
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Sorry, yes, it is privileged. I tinkered around a bit and I'm even more confused now.. I'm able to create, write, and modify files and directories in my new upload location from within the LXC, but the storage service is still telling me permission is denied for the encoded-video .immich. I removed all the .immich files in each directory and used mkdir <backups/uploads/encoded-video/etc> and then Using
Trying to import an external library spams the console with: I do not have any extra mount options in storage.cfg, this is how the mount is layed out: |
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@Rakkzi , this is the exact same setup and issues that I'm seeing. |
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Same for me. |
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To complete my migration I also needed to import my database backup. After making my files available using the above how-to (partly) I did the following to restore the database of my Docker setup to the LXC installation. Warning Make sure you have backups in place and are working on the correct system etc. No warranty for the steps below.
To list the databases and the privileges: I had some minor issues with differences between permissions of the |
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Hi Thanks a lot for the amazing guide. I notice that when immich is creating files it creates them readable only by the immich user. How do I get it to automatically create the files so that they are readable by the group/all? |
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Hi @KatherineTealeaf - I appreciate the kind words. Normally in Proxmox, especially with an unprivileged LXC, that kind of thing is determined by the host settings. Can you describe how your storage is configured on your host, primarily these details:
As an example, I'm storing my photos on a NAS that's running as a VM on Proxmox, with the disks passed through so the VM has control of them. I'm using SMB/CIFS to mount the share on my host, and I used Proxmox's storage UI to configure it. Here is how the entry in my Important to note is the 'options' part, where I added |
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Hello. I am attempting to get this to work with an unpriviliged container (about to give up on that though) and was wondering if you can explain what the options line in this config is doing. Is the Immich user a uid of 1000 on your system? I plan to open immich to the world and as such would rather it be unprivilged but I was not able to find specific documentation that options command and how to properly use it. Thanks! |
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Hi @jshirle2 In my case, these options (especially uid and gid) refer to the UID of my non-root user, and a GID for a group called The way the Immich install script works at the moment is that it creates the The other part involves modifying your LXC config file for Immich, as well as 2 other files in your host. Here is the relevant part of my LXC config: /etc/pve/lxc/124.conf Definitely do not just copy and paste this in your LXC config; but I hope you get the point and can find the correct values for your use-case. After doing this you need to edit And Once the LXC is restarted, then my
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Running into DB restore issues, anyone else see it ? I followed the above steps to recreate the immich db and get the following when I attempt a restore: $ gunzip --stdout "/mnt/immich/backups/immich-db-backup-1751156950651.sql.gz" \
| sed "s/SELECT pg_catalog.set_config('search_path', '', false);/SELECT pg_catalog.set_config('search_path', 'public, pg_catalog', true);/g" \
| sudo -u postgres psql --dbname=immich --username=immich
...
COPY 59511
ERROR: relation "public.face_search" does not exist
...
invalid command \N
invalid command \N
...
ERROR: syntax error at or near "3038832"
LINE 1: 3038832 Vila 1.56654 42.53176 AD 03 2024-11-04 Encamp
^ |
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@wtangofoxtrot Is your Immich DB dump that you are attempting to restore from different installation, like a Docker install? If so, does that Docker install use the same Vector extension? It used to be pgvecto.rs now it's VectorChord (vchord). |
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I encountered the same error, and you were right. After migrating from I followed this guide for migration. |
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Also pardon my ignorance but where does |
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@wtangofoxtrot The LXC installation is not a 1:1 of the Immich docker setup. It's cobbled together from a few different sources. I believe that if you do not have the symlink in the machine-learning folder then machine-learning will fail. |
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For your advanced setup wouldn't it make more since to place upload/library on the NAS instead of upload/upload? |
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@TLauzen Nope - that directory is only used if you use the storage template which is not the default option. Mine currently sits empty. |
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I noticed something yesterday, all my videos from before my migration are not working anymore because their paths are incorrect. A recent video has /mnt/immich/upload/... as path, while an older video has upload/upload/... as path. Anyone else noticed this? |
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@fbloemhof It appears that updating to v1.137+ will do the |
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That sounds even better, will wait until 1.137+ is available then. |
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Update went well, but the change-media-location did not fix the issue. The log says |
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@fbloemhof Bummer! OK, you should try to do it manually then. In Immich, try to open a file that results in the error; then click on the little 'i' to see the path: Now, in your LXC, cd into The path from one of those broken videos/images will be the 'previous' IMMICH_MEDIA_LOCATION value; and the current value you have in After, run this all at once to start Immich and immediately tail the logs:
Hopefully, this will not show any errors. Let it run in the console and browse around in your collection on the web. If there are errors, please post them here; today they went from v1.137.0 to 1.137.3 due to edge cases with the media location migration. I ran the manual commands before they had v1.137.0 out and it worked for me, so there may be an outside chance that the new automatic way it's done in the release is different from what happens if you run the script. |
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I did some other thing: I did not have a Storage Template configured so I configured this and ran the job (https://immich.app/docs/administration/storage-template/). That fixed it. In hindsight maybe the change-media-location could have fixed it when I used as the old path |
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Hello, shouldn't we modify |
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(updated 15th Aug.) Thank you very much for this script. I installed immich again from beginning two days ago. Setting in immich I made: Changes in Quality of thumbmails (lower quality); Turned on Reading Metadata of Faces in EXIF (because I have lots of pictures where faces are already tagged correctly); hardware acceleration - turned on from "none" to VAAPI Everything looks like above and seems to work fine. I can see all the pictures and videos, VAAPI works with trancoding all the videos and even the already given face-tags are there. But I get many errors like this tail -f /var/log/immich/web.log , I think because of AI(?) GPU is passing through. (Dell Wyse 5070 with Intel J5005, immich priv. lxc with 6GB ans 1GB SWAP) OpenVINO seems to work (see log above) I put that into the ..../lxc/120.conf on host: Noone else with those errors in the log? |
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(updated 15th Aug). I tried it also in a clean install with adding that line in .env:
and restartet immich. Unfortunately I still got theese errors. :-( I removed the line. |
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Just a few logs, hopefully that someone understands what that could be? and web.log (just two lines, the other lines are same like in my first post above): Something wrong with face recognition. So...could this be a bug in the script? Could kindly some check the own weblog if there are those errors (with persons on your photos) while importing new data, please? |
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Hello @vhsdream Immich ml Webserver is started as it should (checked 127.0.0.1:3003) I think it must be a bug in the script. Could it be that the AI models ViT-B-32__openai and bufalo_l are not installed? |
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@vsa-d It's not a problem with the script, it looks like a problem with your machine-learning configuration. As for the models, Immich downloads them automatically when it starts a machine-learning operation. Check There's also a chance that your Intel iGPU just cannot handle hardware acceleration, but normally what happens is that it falls back to CPU only, and maybe your CPU is having trouble with that. You can also go into your settings again and increase the loggin verbosity to see if there is more output that we can use to diagnose the issue. |
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Thnak you very much for support. Now it seems to work... Probably my intel J5005 is not able to work with OpenVINO in Proxmox Containers, although I decided to make it privileged. |
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I am a bit confused as to what to do here. I have an unprivileged LXC container running immich. I have an NFS share on my truenas server where I want the data to live. I have mounted the NFS share on my PVE host using the gui. I have bound said mounted share to my container using the pct set command. The mounted share always has an images folder and is permanently owned by nobody/nogroup. I am quite stuck. |
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Unpriviliged LXCs are weird. You have to treat 'root' as a normal user with bind mounts. |
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Bingo! That got it! You may want to streamline the steps to reflect this. |
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I asked my document expert friend Chet G. Petey to beautify my steps on how to fix the permissions: 📸 Immich Bind Mount Permissions for Unprivileged LXC on ProxmoxThis guide explains how to set correct permissions on a bind-mounted media directory (e.g., ✅ Prerequisites & Assumptions
🛠️ Steps1. Confirm Immich user UID inside the LXCRun this on the Proxmox host: pct exec 200 -- id immich
2. Set ownership of the bind mount on the hostStill on the Proxmox host: chown -R 100999:100000 /mnt/immich
3. Set access permissions for group and userchmod -R 770 /mnt/immich
4. Resume Immich setupReturn to Step 7 in: ✅ Notes
Hopefully, my friend Chet is okay to use. 😄 |
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This worked for me |
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I'm still running into the same issue.
On the Proxmox host, my immich users match up exactly as you have, 999. My mount is mp0: /mnt/pve/Photos,mp=/mnt/Photos. I noticed when I "chown -R 100999:100000 /mnt/pve/Photos", it doesn't seem to change. Doing ls -l /mnt/pve shows the /Photos as 100000. Within the immich LXC, /mnt/photo is owned by root. root can touch the folder and create files, but it seems like immich cannot. |
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I have it currently like this |
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I think I figured it out. I'm mounting a share that exists on windows so chown wouldn't update the ownership. I had to remount with the correct ownership, matching up to the immich user id.
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I still have an issue with an NFS export configured with no_root_squash, Privileged container. I am migrating a previous SMB media folder, the current NFS is mounted directly in the guest to /mnt/photos with nfs-common. On the host, all the files are owned by root:media. I have recreated the same media group GID (1000) on the Immich server and added immich to it, but I am still getting this error. I have already tried recursively changing the ownership of all directories on the NFS server to UID:GID 999:996. After doing this, the web UI works, but the collection is not visible, it's empty. |
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On the NFS Share you have to add |
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Thank you for your reply. Unfortunately, I need to use a privileged LXC in order to utilise OpenVINO machine learning acceleration. |
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I would still do the |
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This script has been a life saver! Thank you for the amazing guide! |
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I installed immich using a script. Can you tell me the password for the root user? I need to log in using ssh. |
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I believe if you installed using a helper script you don't have to enter a password to login, it should login to the console directly. Open the console via Proxmox Browser UI and then you can reset password |
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Thank you for the great guide! I'm running into an upload The error I'm getting is: Anyone else getting this error? Hitting a wall here, and not really sure what's wrong. I may move on to trying an NFS Share instead. |
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@Aaron-K I think you're right about a permission issue, but this time it seems specifically related to file modification permissions. Can you share the contents of If you haven't already, try using |
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Sure @vhsdream: Both Thank you for the help. I tried both I did stumble upon this post on the immich git repo. I tried the change suggested by denysvitali which did allow the upload to work. I feel like this is a workaround or bandaid rather than a fix, but wanted to provide it for context.
This is allowing me to upload at the moment, but as stated before, seems like I'm just bypassing the issue and I'm not sure if I'm creating any future issues for myself with Immich. |
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@Aaron-K maybe the I achieved this by using custom mount options in To do that in your situation might require a lot of work, if you are also using the share with other LXCs. I suppose you would need to change the UID of every user in each LXC that needs access to the share to the same UID. But it's also a possibility that Immich simply does not support non-POSIX filesystems; and that something with the way an SMB share is mounted via |
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@vhsdream I may give that a try. Thank you for that recommendation. I'm in the early setup phase of everything, so now would probably be the time. It may take me some time and error, so I'll follow up with the results if I get a chance to go that route. I don't want to take up your guide comments with this issue more than I have too, but thanks again for the support! |
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i did this and it seemed to delete all my media from the previous immich server. Is there any way to get it back, or is it gone? |
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Changing the upload directory wouldn't delete a library. You'll need to restore from a backup or keep troubleshooting your configuration. You have backups, right? |
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@vhsdream you are Not in discord, so i need to random ping you in some Discussions. Immich switched to pnpm |
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@MickLesk no worries, I'm well aware and I've been working on it the past couple of days 😄 |
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Immich in an LXC
Love Immich? Hate Docker? Me too! That's why I wanted a Proxmox Helper Script for the best open-source, self-hosted photo management software to ever exist.
So the script is here, and it seems to work, and it's huge and kind of complex. Let's go over what the script CAN do and what it CANNOT do.
✅ Can do
🚫 Cannot Do
/opt/immich/upload.Since so far we've been receiving feedback that the major problem people are having is related to using a different upload folder (with good reason!), this guide is mainly geared towards attempting to demystify that part.
📁 The upload Folder
It's located by default in
/opt/immich/upload, on the same disk as the LXC itself. Definitely not ideal, since you're gonna have to continuously increase the size of the disk as you add more media. I'd wager that pretty much all of us use some kind of NAS, which is likely on completely different disks, and that's where we want to store our Immich uploads.It defaults to where it does because there are many different ways to configure storage on Proxmox, and the script is unable accommodate them as well as properly setup permissions in each use case. So this is left up to you to figure out. That being said, this guide is not going to cover how to properly mount a network share in your LXC, aside from the fact of whether you should choose to create an unprivileged LXC or a privileged LXC.
❓ Choose Privileged if...
immichuser can write to the share.❔ Choose Unprivileged (default and recommended) if...
/etc/subuidand/etc/subgidentries on your Proxmox host.Needless to say, regardless of the path you choose, you should have this figured out before proceeding. But to be a good sport and to get you started, I'll say you need to learn about how unprivileged LXCs operate in relation to the host, and how to leverage that to be able to mount a writable share in your Immich LXC. Try this writeup for a good starting point. And now, the GUIDE.
⚙ Changing the Immich upload directory in your Immich LXC
systemctl stop immich-web immich-ml/opt/immich/.env) to reflect your chosen mount pointnano/vi /opt/immich/.envLook for
IMMICH_MEDIA_LOCATIONand change it to the path of your bind mount.For example, say your bind mount is at
/mnt/immich. Do this:Save and close the file.
rootuser can write to the folder. Even if you haven't uploaded data, there are files in each of those folders that must also be present for this to work.cp -a /opt/immich/upload/* /mnt/immich(or whatever your location is)You want the folder structure to look like this:
And within each of those dirs there should be an
.immichfile, and potentially a folder with a long alphanumeric name which is your user ID, if you have existing uploaded content.Delete these symlinks:
Recreate them so they point to your new location:
So the folders should look like the below:
Confirm ownership of the Immich folder in case it's changed.
chown -R immich:immich /opt/immichNEW STEP as of v1.136.0/July 31 2025. Apparently changing your IMMICH_MEDIA_LOCATION can wreak some havok on how immich now handles path management. In their efforts to get to stable and to have a more sane handling of paths, with v1.136.0+ (actually I noticed something funny with some paths a couple versions earlier) you may need to run the following in order to have all your images/videos/thumbnails appear.
This will start an interactive script that allows you to update the path of assets in the DB from relative to absolute. Right now I can't tell if running this is absolutely necessary, but one tip off that you might need to is if you see lots of blurry thumbnails, or if you go to zoom into an image on the web and it suddenly disappears.
I should also note that it's OK to run this later on, well after you've changed the location; just make sure that Immich services are stopped before you do it.
ANOTHER UPDATE - literally as I posted the above, a new version dropped which apparently will detect a change to IMMICH_MEDIA_LOCATION and will do the above for you automatically.
You need to check Immich because if you messed up or skipped the symlink thing, if you only check the log things will seem fine. As soon as you try to look at your timeline (all thumbnails blurred) or open a photo (it won't load), then you'll see the problem.
rm -rf /opt/immich/uploadThat should be it.
📝 A Note About Updating
During the update process, the script deletes everything in the
/opt/immich/app/directory, including those symlinks. But they get recreated, using the information from your .env, whereIMMICH_MEDIA_LOCATIONwill point to your current upload directory! So you do not need to recreate anything yourself.🚀 Advanced Settings
I mentioned earlier that my setup is a bit different, which caused me to overlook the symlink step. I actually have not changed
IMMICH_MEDIA_LOCATIONin my .env file. Instead I made an additional symlink from/opt/immich/upload/uploadto my bind mount. I did this because I prefer to store the thumbnails, encoded videos and other data on the LXC (for the responsiveness and speed), while storing the photos themselves on the NAS. So far this has worked out for me, but keep in mind that if you want to do this, thumbnail and encoded video data do take up space on your LXC disk, so you'll have to make sure you increase your LXC disk size accordingly. You can also customise this to your liking, for example create another symlink for/opt/immich/upload/backupsto your bind mount, to store the DB backups on your NAS (I might do this myself).Steps (Photo files only, as an example)
**If you have any existing data in the
/opt/immich/upload/uploadfolder, you better copy/move it to your bind mount location! And make double-certain that your destination has a.immichfile (you can simply create an empty one if needed).Delete the
/opt/immich/upload/uploaddir, leaving the others intact.rm -r /opt/immich/upload/uploadCreate the symlink(s) and restore ownership
Looks like this:
./immich-admin change-media-locationin/opt/immich/app/bin. See step 6 from above for more info.OK, that's all folks! If you think anything in this guide can be made more clear and/or explicit, or if you find any errors, please let me know and I will fix 👍🏼
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