Follow these instructions to setup Immich on your phone. This will backup pictures or videos stored on your phone. The content can be viewed, searched, shared, organized into albums, etc with the phone app or by visiting the Stovall Hut Immich app in your browser. For a quick look at common issues/questions about immich, see the FAQ.
Note that the Immich app is completely independent from the Synology Photos app. It can be installed alongside Synology Photos and saves its data to separate storage on the Stovall Hut server as well. Neither one will interfere with the other.
This guide may cover the most important things and is hopefully up to date with the product. That said, click this link to see the official immich documentation for the mobile app (you may want to scan that but the instructions below are more specific about the Stovall Hut Immich installation/configuration).
¶ Install/Setup iPhone App
Visit the App Store on your phone and use the search tool to find immich. Download the app to your phone.
Start the Immich App on your phone. You will probably first see a prompt to allow Immich to send you notifications. Press Allow.
Next, you'll see a prompt to identify the Immich server. Answer the prompt by filling in the full URL of Immich: https://media.stovallhut.online
Press [Next] to continue.
Now you'll see a prompt to Login with Stovall Hut SSO. Press that button to perform the login.
Note that before or during the login you may see a popup telling you that Immich would like to access your Photo Library. Press the Allow Full Access choice and continue the login.
You will probably see a “consent” screen that tells you Immich wants to use stovallhut.online to signin. Press [Continue].
Note: If you have a current Stovall Hut SSO session (i.e. you logged into SSO less than a day ago on your phone) there will be no prompt for user/password/totp and the Immich app will open immediately.
¶ Backup your photos to the Immich Server
At the opening screen of the Immich app you'll see a couple buttons in the top-right of the screen as shown here.
Press the Upload button shown above.
This will prompt for you to select albums to backup to the server. Press the [Select] button.
Select only your Recents album initially. The other selections for auto-generated albums such as Live Photos, Recently Saved, etc overlap the Recents album - generally speaking you should not enable backup of ANY of these auto-generated albums. Avoid selecting any manually created albums also for now (topic discussed more later).
After selecting Recents press the left-arrow to back out of that screen.
- Review Backup Options (see below) before enabling the backup to start.
- Visit Settings→Sync Status and see that the Sync Local, Sync Remote, Hash asset jobs are not active. This is not essential but if you have lots of photos, completing the Hash asset job can eliminate the need to upload photos that already exist on the server. Maybe unnecessary given 9/23/25 update where progress shows on the Upload screen.
To begin uploading your selected photos, use the Enable Backup slider you see at the bottom of the screen.
Upon using the Enable Backup slider, your phone will begin uploading “assets” (photos or videos) to the server and the Remainder count you see will go down as the upload proceeds. If there are large videos to upload, the count may “stutter” or not change for significant periods of time. Leave this running and let it complete. You can switch to other apps but don't swipe this one off the screen - that will stop the upload. However, if you stop the app and restart it later (with Enable Backup turned on) then it will resume the backup where it left off.
Note that you probably don't have to upload ALL of the assets on your phone. The assets stored in Synology Photos have already been stored in Immich early September 2025. The iPhone should recognize what's already stored on the server and not upload those. However, that's not entirely true. Specifically, your phone computes a hash code/checksum (simply a big number based on photo/video content). If that asset is already on the server, it will not be uploaded again (but see the duplicates) discussion below for exceptions to this.
¶ Backup Options
There are a few important options to set related to backing up assets from your phone. On the opening screen of the immich app, press the Upload button at the top. On that upload screen you'll see a Gear Icon in the upper right. Press that and you see the backup options as shown here.
To turn the option on, use the slider to its right.
Each option is discussed below.
¶ Videos
Enable this option to upload your videos even when on your cellular connection (not WiFi). Probably not a good idea.
¶ Photos
Enable uploading photos on a cellular connection. Probably fine.
¶ Uploading specific albums
So far only the Recents album is being backed up. But you can backup/upload manually created albums too. But before doing so, decide how you want to handle those in Immich. The Immich server can create an immich album with the same name as your album on your phone and store the assets there. But it can also simply upload those assets just as though found in your Recents album and essentially pay not attention to which phone album they came from - you decide.
If you turn on this option, you also need to separately return to the select-albums screen and select the specific albums you want to be uploading.
Hint: I tend to think there are too many subtle issues around this that affect the organization in the webui that can't easily be reversed.
¶ Foreground/Background Uploads
Press the account settings button in the top-right corner of the immich opening screen. Pick Settings→Backup. You'll see the following screen.
Turn on forground backup to make Immich upload new photos when you show the app. In my experience Sept 2025 it appears to upload in the foreground when you login at least (with upload enabled). Turning this on may affect going to the app when you're already logged in?
Turn on background service to make Immich periodically upload new photos whether you go to the app or not.
¶ Background Upload Notes
When you turn on background update this will visit the iPhone settings for the Immich app, where you should enable Background App Refresh.
To reliably enable background processing, you should minimize the number of apps for which it is allowed (and it may be many/most if you haven't paid attention). To do this go the the iPhone Settings→General. Scroll down to Background App Refresh and pick that. Turn off refresh for virtually all your apps. You should probably keep it turned on for (of course) Immich, then Drive, DS-note, OwnTracks, Photos Mobile or other apps you know need to do background processing.
For any app that does background processing, it helps to visit the app occasionally (every few days?) to prove to IOS that you care :-)
¶ Problems and workarounds
¶ Duplicate Assets
It is possible for apparently duplicate assets to make it to the server - not exact duplicates but close. Why does this happen? The most common reason is that Synology Photos may (depending on your settings) modify the asset that gets stored on the server. For example Photos has an option to store JPG instead of HEIC files.
To check for duplicates visit the Immich app in your desktop web browser. Look in the left-hand panel for Utilities→Review Duplicates. If you have duplicates you can step thru them and view them and manually resolve the duplicates (keep one of the two). But if you have a LOT that can be very tedious. Consider the buttons at the top that can resolve ALL duplicates with an algorithm that chooses to keep the biggest one.
¶ Unresponsive Client
At the time of this writing, if you visit the Immich app and have not used it for a day (or maybe somewhat less) then it may be unresponsive.
When you normally go to the app you should expect to see a “spinner” for a few seconds or so at the top of the screen. But in its unresponsive state, it spins forever. Press the Upload tool and it will show you a prompt to select Backup Albums, as though you have not done that.
To get it out of this state, swipe up from the bottom till you see a tiled view of all your open apps. Now swipe immich up all the way off the screen. Finally, restart Immich from the home screen. It should now behave normally.
¶ No-response problem may be fixed 9/23/25
From the 1.143.0 release notes…
¶ Notable fix: Mobile “freezes”
This release fixes an issue that the mobile application could occasionally “freeze”, with the thumbnails would stop loading, and certain pages would become unusable until the application was forced closed. This has proved much more challenging to solve. We determined that the cause was due to concurrent access to SQLite from background/foreground processes, which could have put the app into this state. We have taken measures to address these situations and believe the application should be much more stable. If you are still running into these types of issues, please let us know!
¶ Delayed Thumbnails/Facial Recognition
When you upload hundreds or thousands of photos, Immich may be slow to recognize faces, or even thumbnails in some cases. Immich runs a background job for that. It may take hours or even overnight. Come back tomorrow and it should be good (your administrator can tell if background jobs are running).
¶ Problem with remaining uploads
After seeing persistent "remaining" photos, I looked at the log (Settings→log). At iPhone→Photos I did a search by date (like "May 12 2018") and toggled "Live" off on the photo, then it uploaded. In one case it was not Live and on the ... menu I picked "Revert to original" and it uploaded.
