Lost ownership of existing photos after recreating user

[Rokonag]

Hi,

We recently had to recreate my two user accounts in Immich (same email addresses as before).
After that, all our photos are still physically present in the /photos storage folder and visible in the database table public.asset, but they are not associated with our new user accounts.

What happened:

Original users were deleted (or.. better said: lost during container reconfiguration)

New user was created with the same email as before

The new user account has no assets linked to it in the public.asset table

There are ~70,000 photos from multiple devices and decades stored in /mnt/disk1/fotos_immich

Database query confirms that the ownerId in public.asset for existing photos does not match the new user's id in public.user

As a result, all uploaded media is “orphaned” in the database and invisible in the UI

What I tried:

Checked public.user and public.asset tables via PostgreSQL

Attempted to find matching ownerId values — none found for the new user

File structure on disk is intact and readable by Immich

What I need:

A way to safely reassign all existing assets in public.asset from the old ownerId to the new user's id

Ideally without re-importing all media, since this would be extremely time-consuming (~70k files)

Environment:

Immich version: 1.137.3

PostgreSQL version: 16.8

Docker on Unraid

Photos mounted at /photos → /mnt/disk1/fotos_immich

If it helps -> I'd pay for a solution (or donate to the project aswell)
Yeah I know I should have used backups, shame on me.

Thanks in advance for your help!

[Rokonag]

SOLVED: ChatGPT helped me restore the existing .sql.gz backup into PostgreSQL and correctly re-link the files in Immich.