Help differentiating and organizing media from different sources

[thisisgonnatakeawhile]

Hello everyone.

Let's say a family member wants to upload to the Immich server several photos from a given trip (albeit not currently possible, ideally that'd be directly done to an external library). These photos come from two different sources:

1. Phone's Camera folder.
2. HorribleMessagingApp's image shared folder.

And let's say the pictures from the HorribleMessagingApp image folder have incorrect date and time readings because their original EXIF metadata has been stripped.

Because it's currently impossible to upload media directly to an album, uploading (together or one after the other) both sources to the Immich server causes the photo stream to display an unreliable mess of wheres, whens, and from whoms. This makes it nearly impossible to differentiate between the pictures from each source and to create reliable albums for one another (note that media uploaded manually via the app does not display the synced‑cloud icon).

One way I can think of organizing these pictures would be by downloading those Whatsapp photos to a computer, using exiftool to set their dates according to their corresponding file title (for example: IMG-20260221-WA0001), creating a folder for them in the external library, scanning external libraries in Immich, and running Salvoxia's script 'immich folder album creator' to create an album from that folder automatically (same for the phone's pictures except without the exiftool step in case they haven't been uploaded and organized into an album before). From there, it'd be easier to fine tune their date and time and possibly end up merging some of them with the phone's camera album.

Another method that occurs to me right now could be to upload the unreliable pictures first, and use Immich to set their date correctly by taking the pictures in the phone as reference. This wouldn't work if the phone's pictures have been uploaded first though, and it would imply having one album from the two sources instead of two.

Does anyone know whether there's a better/easier method of doing this? For an elderly non-tech savvy individual this is too complicated without assistance, so it'd be great to learn of any other way that could help streamline the process.

Thank you for the help and much love to the devs.

P.S: I hope one day Immich could get the features of creating albums upon upload, and direct upload to external libraries. That'd be very useful.

[bo0tzz]

Because it's currently impossible to upload media directly to an album

It definitely is possible to upload directly to an album. I think in this case you’re looking for the sync albums toggle in the apps backup settings?

[thisisgonnatakeawhile]

Hey bo0tzz, thanks heaps for your reply.

I hope I haven't missunderstood your answer and please correct me if I'm wrong because I don't have the app in front of me right now, but I take that you're referring to adding photos to an already created album and then having the app sync those changes automatically? If that's the case, the problem remains that in order to be able to do that, the user has to upload the pictures to the server first, right? Then add them to an album by selecting them from the photos stream (which at that point could already be unreliable, making such task pretty difficult). If that's not what you meant let me know, I'll try to elucidate this better a bit later.

Thanks again!

[bo0tzz]

I'm referring to the sync albums toggle at the bottom here:

[nkrabben]

This doesn't solve the date-time issue, but consider embedding or creating XMP metadata to assign "WhatsApp" as the manufacturer for those images. It can help act as a filter for any future provenance work.