Immich 3.0 release notes / what's new

Immich 3.0 release notes / what's new

Immich v3.0.0 is a major update that introduces powerful automation tools, professional-grade photo editing on mobile, and critical infrastructure improvements for video handling and background synchronization. While the release includes breaking changes, the team notes that most of these affect third-party API integrations rather than the general user experience.

Automation and Workflows

Immich v3.0.0 introduces a preview of Workflows, a drag-and-drop builder that allows users to automate library actions by chaining triggers, filters, and actions.

Users can access this feature via Utilities > Workflows on the web interface. The system supports both a visual editor for building and a JSON editor for sharing configurations. Each workflow consists of a trigger (the entry point) followed by a sequence of steps, which can include conditional filters and specific actions. To facilitate community collaboration, workflows can be shared as plain text or JSON files.

Mobile Experience Enhancements

Non-Destructive Editing

Mobile users now have access to a non-destructive editing suite that mirrors the web version released in v2.5.0. This system allows for cropping, rotating, and adjusting images without modifying the original file. Edits are stored as metadata, meaning they can be revisited or reverted at any time and synchronized across mobile and web platforms.

Note that some previous mobile editing features—such as recoloring photos, editing live photos, and editing local assets—have been removed and are slated for return in future releases.

Background Backup Reliability

Backup stability has been significantly improved for both major mobile platforms:

  • Android: A new periodic task scheduler replaces the previous system, which was limited to newly taken photos. The app can now upload entire libraries in the background while better adhering to Android's background execution limits and providing warnings regarding battery optimization settings.
  • iOS: The background refresh task now executes sync and upload work in parallel, ensuring uploads begin within the restricted time windows provided by iOS.

Android Gallery Integration

Immich can now function as a system gallery/image viewer on Android. When opening a photo or video from another application, users can select Immich to view the asset directly in the Immich viewer, with options to upload the file to the library or share it.

Video and Performance Infrastructure

Real-Time Video Transcoding (Preview)

Immich now supports HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) and real-time video transcoding, allowing the server to transcode videos on-the-fly. This eliminates the need for generating offline transcodes for every file, resulting in lower storage overhead. Key benefits include:

  • Automatic and manual quality switching.
  • Transcoding to the best codec supported by the client device.

This feature is experimental and currently limited to the web app. It requires a powerful server, and hardware acceleration is strongly recommended.

Web Video Player

A new custom video player has been implemented for the web app to ensure consistent controls and layout across all devices. This specifically resolves issues on iOS where native OS controls were often obscured by the Immich navigation bar.

Library Management and Maintenance

Integrity Checks

To ensure data safety, the maintenance page now includes Integrity Reports. Immich scans the file system and compares it against the database to identify:

  • Untracked files: Files present on disk but not in the database.
  • Missing files: Database references to files that no longer exist on disk.
  • Checksum mismatches: Files that have been corrupted or improperly renamed.

Recently Added Page

A new "Recently Added" view is available on the web (Explore tab) and mobile (Search tab). This sorts assets by the date they were added to the system rather than the date the photo was taken, simplifying the management of large batch imports.

Technical Migration and Breaking Changes

Updating to v3 requires changing the IMMICH_VERSION in the .env file to v3 before running docker compose pull && docker compose up -d.

Breaking changes primarily target the API and internal refactors, including:

  • Migration from class-validator to zod.
  • Removal of deprecated environment variables and several API endpoints (e.g., /api/server/theme and getRandom).
  • Dropping support for pgvecto.rs.
  • Requirement of numpy 2.4 for machine learning components.

Community Insights

Discussion among users highlights Immich's position as a strong self-hosted alternative to Google and Apple Photos, particularly when paired with networking tools like Tailscale. However, some users expressed concerns regarding the lack of end-to-end encryption (E2EE).

"I considered Immich, but I settled on Ente because of the encryption... I like how you can share an album and anyone can contribute to it without an account."

Conversely, other users argue that E2EE is unnecessary for home-hosted data, noting that it complicates data recovery:

"Because you don't have e2ee... if you lost your keys you didn't lose the only memories that remain of your grandma - you just copy across the .jpgs to a new device."

Sources