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Comment by greysonp | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely love immich. Prior to the release of the new "Beta timeline", it was difficult to recommend without reservation, because there were a lot of performance issues on Android, and syncing was just non-functional on my wife's iPhone. However, since enabling the beta timeline, the app is basically perfect now. I've been running it for months without issue, and having a first-class CLI means I've been able to do things like automatically create albums from my Signal backup. Big thanks to the immich team!

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Thank you for this, I updated some time ago but never really switched. Night and day difference !

The other thing I'm waiting for is search results ordered by date instead of relevance. When I'm searching for a picture in particular I know was taken 3 years ago, and search keywords to find it, it's impossible to find this specific photo because the ordering seem random

The only problem I've had with it so far is that the date on photos coming from icloud is when they were uploaded, not the date that the photo was created or even the date that I've marked the photo as being taken. Makes seeing photos from 90 years ago kind of strange.

Does iCloud by any chance strip the exif data from the photos, so the real date is simply not available anymore?

It does not

I removed myself from beta. I always have iPhone and Android apps stalling on backing up unless the app is open.

The recent betas have been extremely performant for me, especially today’s. Might be worth checking out again.

Some performance bottlenecks seem to be still in. I added around 200 images and 10 videos of my last vacation manually via Intent to the Immich app on Android.

The startup of the Activity is VERY slow. Images are rendered one by one in the list view (potentially in full resolution?) and the scrolling in the list is quite slow. The upload button does not keep the "uploading" state but after some time jumps back to the initial "start upload" state. Going into background or turning the screen off sometimes stops the upload. This test was done on my Samsung S23 Ultra (so CPU power should not be the issue).

Nevertheless the upload works as expected if I stay in the app and keep the screen active. Seems like this is not really the intended way of uploading things to Immich (auto upload is).

Maybe it's because my server is still on v.1.139.4, but I have had the opposite experience with the new beta timeline on Android. I disabled it after trying it for a week because it took so long for thumbnails to load vs. the stable version. Compared to Google Photos, any version of the Immich timeline I've tried feels extremely clunky. It's a great backup alternative and I commend the team behind it, but it is far from being a product I'd recommend as an everyday photo gallery app.

> I've been able to do things like automatically create albums from my Signal backup

Interesting, would you mind elaborating on how you do that? I take it you have your backup key stored on your home server then? What tool do you use to decrypt & parse the backup?

Sure! I make Signal backups on my Android device, sync them to my home server via FolderSync, and then run a nightly script that uses signalbackup-tools[1] to extract media from my family group chats and upload them to my immich server via their CLI.

[1] https://github.com/bepaald/signalbackup-tools

Couldn't you simply select the Signal folder that contains the media and let Immich monitor changes

What Signal folder?

CLI? Didn't even know that! A doc pointer would be awesome

https://immich.app/docs/features/command-line-interface/

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