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Comment by psadauskas | Hacker News Reader

Has the ios photo sync gotten better? I've got 20k photos on my phone, and last I tried it filled up the storage on my phone with the originals, and never completed the process, even after leaving my phone open, unlocked, and the immich app running in the foreground for several days, on the same local network as the server.

I know they were working on it, but haven't kept up, I just want to know if it works better now and I should try again.

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I have a largish library at about 400gb. I synced it completely using the mobile app. It took a few months (it just finished in early June) but it’ll eventually do it. I know there are other ways but I figured this was the laziest way to do it.

I have synced ~9000 photos from my phone in february. That worked pretty well. I was done in about 10 hours. I don't remember whether the originals were downloaded, or whether they were deleted automatically afterwards. Felt like a smooth process though.

The release notes says:

> On iOS, the background refresh task now runs its sync and upload work in parallel, so uploads actually start within the short time window iOS allows.

But I don't know if that fixes your issue.

Large file uploads are non-resumable. That is, if you have any videos at a decent bitrate and resolution, you need to be able to upload the whole file in a single session. iOS doesn't make this easy to do via background uploads. I uploaded everything by keeping the app open overnight.

Sync was already fixed in the last major version, at least for us (android and iphone)

Likely more of an IOS issue than Immich issue. Apple doesn't care for apps that make it easier to exit iCloud.

No, it’s an Immich issue. Not OP, but I was already using Synology Photos. Synology finished syncing my library in two days, while Immich was still syncing after more than a week. I decided it wasn’t worth it after that experience.

Why are you syncing from your phone instead of your Synology then? Can't you sync from your NAS then just have pictures uploaded as you take them? iOS has a lot of restrictions compared to Android so two days really doesn't feel like a meaningful difference from a week.

The 2 days were spent uploading my entire library from scratch. After that, daily syncs only take a few minutes.

I don’t think this should be framed as iOS vs Android. From a technical perspective, I understand why the behavior differs. But from a user’s perspective, all they see is that one app works much better than the other.

My family doesn’t care about the technical reasons. They just saw one app finish much sooner than the other, and they preferred the one that worked better. Based on that experience, I can’t recommend Immich to them.

I’m not an Immich or Synology user but essentially the mobile apps end up replicating your whole structure a little better, at least when I did the iCloud library to Ente import.

I could have done a data download from Apple but essentially leaving the Ente app open and choosing my albums to back up was a “set it and forget it” process.

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