Setting up Home Assistant Add-On Immich

Akore · April 13, 2025, 5:30pm

Anyone on here an expert on setting up Immich in HAos? Would like to move away from Google Photos and this looks like it the most recommended method but I could only find one YouTube video on setting it up and it was in español and a little old as it looks like Immich as been added to Add-ons. Not sure why there are 3 versions, so my question’s are, 1, which one do I install, 2, how do I go about setting it up? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Akore · April 16, 2025, 12:25pm

That is what I was afraid of. No one else is using it.

Any other alternatives that someone can recommend?

davill · April 24, 2025, 11:27pm

hassio-addons/immich_openvino at master · alexbelgium/hassio-addons · GitHub
This HA add-in works fine. Immich runs inside Docker. I had no difficulty uploading files and viewing.

athua · April 25, 2025, 3:36am

I have Immich setup but not as a HA Add-on. As I run my HA in a Proxmox VM, I have run up another VM with docker and have Immich running in a separate VM as I don’t want my HA VM running too many services which could impact its stability with controlling my home integrations.

Akore · April 25, 2025, 10:45pm

I only have HAos running on an older Intel NUC NUC7CJY thus why I was hoping someone had setup Immich directly in HAos. I can usually find a video on YouTube on setting it up and using on just about anything but I could not find one on Immich.

Akore · April 27, 2025, 4:47pm

I some how managed to get Immich working in Home Assistant but I now need to know how to get a External Library setup as the internal SSD in the Home Assistant NUC is small and would fill up fast with photos:

athua · April 28, 2025, 9:26am

To setup an External library, create in Immich an external library entry with the following path:

/usr/src/app/external

Then have the following in the docker-compose.yml file:

services:
  immich-server:
    volumes:
      - ${EXTERNAL_PATH}:/usr/src/app/external:ro

And in the .env file the following path to the location of your photo library that has been mounted on the computer running Immich:

EXTERNAL_PATH=/mnt/nfs/datastore/pictures

As to how Immich is configured while running as an Add-on for HA, I’m not sure where the config files are located.

Akore · April 28, 2025, 6:37pm

Thank you, yes I did manage to get the external library working but I think what I really need is to change the default photo storage location of Immich.There is a setting in the Configuration section for: library_location which I have set to: /192.168.1.80/HD8TB/immich

I have tried all combinations for data_location, library_location and localdisks, but all fail to work.

These are the errors I get and the local disk mounting successfully:

[08:07:16] WARNING: Library folder in /share/immich/library already exists, is a real folder, and is not empty. Moving to /share/immich/library_old

[Nest] 1314 - 04/28/2025, 8:08:06 AM ERROR [Api:StorageService] Failed to read /share/immich/library/.immich: Error: ENOENT: no such file or directory, open ‘/share/immich/library/.immich’

[Nest] 1641 - 04/28/2025, 9:11:18 AM ERROR [Api:StorageService] Failed to read /192.168.1.80/HD8TB/immich/encoded-video/.immich: Error: ENOENT: no such file or directory, open ‘/192.168.1.80/HD8TB/immich/encoded-video/.immich’
[Nest] 1641 - 04/28/2025, 9:11:18 AM LOG [Api:StorageService] Verifying system mount folder checks, current state: {“mountChecks”:{“thumbs”:true,“upload”:true,“backups”:true,“library”:true,“profile”:true,“encoded-video”:true}}
api worker exited with code 1
Starting api worker

[09:09:29] INFO: Available Disks for mounting :

NAME LABEL SIZE FSTYPE RO
├─sda2 24M squashfs 0
├─sda3 256M erofs 0
├─sda4 24M squashfs 0
├─sda5 256M erofs 0
└─sdb1 HD8TB 7.3T ext4 0
└─sdc1 HD3TB 2.7T ext4 0

Supported fs : ext3 ext2 ext4 squashfs vfat msdos iso9660 erofs ntfs3 exfat btrfs

Inspired from : dianlight (Lucio Tarantino) · GitHub

Local Disks mounting…
… HD8TB is a device by label
[09:09:29] INFO: Mounting HD8TB of type ext4
[09:09:29] INFO: Success! HD8TB mounted to /mnt/HD8TB

athua · April 29, 2025, 9:20am

With your Immich installation, do you have a .env and docker-compose.yml files?
If so, how has it been configured?
The docker-compose.yml UPLOAD_LOCATION is where the Immich library will be created in so you need to leave that as:

      - ${UPLOAD_LOCATION}:/usr/src/app/upload

And update the .env with the path like the following:

UPLOAD_LOCATION=/share/immich/

See the Immich documentation about Custom Locations:

Akore · April 29, 2025, 1:04pm

Thank you for the reply.

“With your Immich installation, do you have a .env and docker-compose.yml files?
If so, how has it been configured?”

This I am not sure about as I just install everything from the Add-On store and only use the Configuration section and I do not do anything in .yml

I do have File editor installed and when I look around under the homeassistant/ folder I do not see either. I have really only edited the configuration.yaml file and that was for adding theme.

If you can point me to the correct folder location I can try and find them.

athua · April 30, 2025, 12:52am

As I installed Immich on a separate server to HA using docker compose, I was able to configure it based on the guides from the Immich documentation. I don’t think installing it as a HA Add-on is fully supported or documented as Immich does not appear as an Add-on for me in HA.

I don’t think you can get to the Add-on config files via the SSH console addon in HA.
You can try logging in via the HA console itself via the cli interface:

When at the ‘ha >’ prompt, type in ‘login’ then enter.
then:
cd /mnt/data/supervisor/addons

The config for Immich may be somewhere there but do all this at your own risk as it is not advisable to be editing files directly via the CLI unless you know what you are doing.

Akore · May 3, 2025, 2:40pm

Thank you again. I have been doing a lot of research and now I am thinking about redoing my Intel NUC7CJY and running PROXMOX on it and install HA into PROXMOX and then install immich as that should then let me configure it the way need after doing some simple PROXMOX file sharing for the attached USB drives I currently have shared out using Samba NAS addon. Hopefully the NUC7CJY that I have 8GB memory installed, is strong enough to pull it off.

zuzzy · May 12, 2025, 3:57pm

Hi, to add to this thread as when you are looking for Immich in HA this is the best one out there, I just had a huge fight with HA and got it working for Wallpanel

Without repeating the instructions in Wallpanel, some key elements I needed to get mine working:

GitHub - fabio-garavini/hassio-addons: Collection of easy to use Home Assistant Addons 🏠 Is a repo for Immich all in one rather than mess around with Postgres . Install that first and it should just work (if you don’t run HA with native SSL anyway, but you will find that a problem below)
Once that is installed, you can access it directly, but if you want to use it in dashboards (eg with Wallpanel) you come across the CORS errors that are mentioned everywhere. Using Nginx proxy manager (which is the easiest way to front HA with SSL as native SSL in HA doesn’t cover addons well), the best answer was from this post: Immich API usage / CORRS settings · Issue #13 · fabio-garavini/hassio-addons · GitHub
However not mentioned there is that Immich doesn’t support being hosted in a custom location, it must be the root /. - the only answer I had to that was create a new duckdns entry for Immich (I already have one for my HA externally so that takes seconds) then get Nginx proxy manager to get le a lets encrypt certificate (built in function), then make a custom location of that as shown in the post (note you click the cog in the custom location to add the settings.
But then the settings code in that post didn’t work, I had to use the code provided in the Wallpanel guide here Media Sources - WallPanel Documentation
Then I got blank images, and 2 things fixed it. A) you must it seems state a library/folder name and not leave that config blank, and b) I had to disable Wallpanel showing shared images.
I still got blank images, but slowly they began to appear, and after 2 hours they rotate without delay!
The reason I did the effort for Immich is I can sync an Apple photos library to it, and replicate what Google photos was doing

Hope this helps someone

bbrendon · May 13, 2025, 5:38am

I would not recommend a large docker container like Immich running in haos unless you really understand what you are getting into. I myself would never run it in haos because I feel like it would destabilize my home automation setup and cause issues with haos backups.

Most people run it under unraid, proxmox, but outside the home automation realm.

jedediahg · June 27, 2025, 8:54am

What is the point of integrating Immich with HA? Why would anyone want to do this?

bbrendon · June 27, 2025, 7:47pm

Yea. Seems pointless to me based on the current listed functions but to each their own. For example I see lots of dashboards online that show people are tracking what I would consider useless information.

Akore · June 28, 2025, 12:21pm

Thanks for all the replys!. I did managed to get Proxmox setup running HA, OMV and Immich! I setup Immich on its on VM on a attached USB drive to my NUC and it has plenty of space to sync all my photos from my phone. Highly recommend Immich for those that either are running out of the free 15GB Google space or just want to get away from your private photos being hosted by a big company like Google.