u/Obvious-Interest-845

Hello everyone!

I'm the guy behind Immich Stack, Immich Places and Findich (yes, me again, and all apps compatible with V3!)

When I released Immich Places, several of you asked the same thing: "nice, but can this go into the files themselves?". I said it would be my next project, so here it is!

Everything you fix in Immich (locations, dates, ratings, descriptions) lives in the Immich database, not in your photos. Export a photo, open it in Lightroom, or migrate to another tool in 10 years: all of it is gone.

So I built Immich Exif, a CLI tool that downloads each asset, embeds the missing metadata directly into the file with exiftool, and replaces the asset on your server.

What it does:

• Writes GPS, city/state/country, dates (with the correct timezone), ratings, descriptions and camera info into the standard EXIF/XMP/IPTC tags
• Shows you a diff for each photo before touching anything (confirm/skip/quit), or run it unattended with -y
• Keeps your albums, favorites, shared links, stacks and live photo pairs intact
• Photos and videos (mp4/mov/m4v)
• Already-synced assets are skipped, so you can re-run it (or cron it) on a big library
• Works with Immich v3 and older versions
• As all files needs to be downloaded, edited and reuploaded, it's a slow process (depends on your internet speed). Start with small albums to dry-run/test and see how it runs :)

About safety, because editing, patching, removing might be a destructive action:

• -dry-run shows every change and writes nothing
• Downloads AND re-uploads are checksum-verified before the original is touched
• The replaced original always goes to the Immich trash, never permanently deleted
• Anything unexpected (duplicate, mid-run edit on the server, missing checksum) makes it stop to prevent destruction
• I tested it on my 30k library without issues, but we never know, so keep backups

But as always, please start with -dry-run, and as always, keep backups, KEEP BACKUPS!

Fast setup:

Prebuilt binary (you just need exiftool, brew install exiftool on macOS, apt install libimage-exiftool-perl on Debian/Ubuntu). Grab it from the releases page, then:

export IMMICH_URL=https://your-immich-server.com
export IMMICH_API_KEY=your-api-key

immich-exif -dry-run <asset-id>       # preview one photo, writes nothing
immich-exif -album <album-id>         # one album, interactive (confirm/skip each photo)
immich-exif -y -workers 4 -all        # the whole library, unattended

Or build from source (Go 1.24+):

git clone https://github.com/Majorfi/immich-exif
cd immich-exif/src && go build -o immich-exif .

Or with docker (bundles exiftool):

docker run --rm \
  -e IMMICH_URL=https://your-immich-server.com \
  -e IMMICH_API_KEY=your-api-key \
  ghcr.io/majorfi/immich-exif:latest -dry-run <asset-id>

A .env file in the working directory works too. You can see all the flags available in the readme in the repo.

Disclaimers: I'm not affiliated with the Immich team, so this is just a community tool. As always, I provide it as-is, and I'll keep an eye on issues and fix what I can. You should always keep backups, and use it at your own risk. AI was used for documentation, drafting, and review.

GitHub: https://github.com/Majorfi/immich-exif
Release: https://github.com/Majorfi/immich-exif/releases
Website: https://immich.quub.tech/exif
Sponsoring: https://github.com/sponsors/Majorfi

Thanks everyone and happy to answer questions!

And do a backup

Hello everyone,

I do my edits in Capture One, then export the photos to my computer and upload them to Immich. But since I'm not that consistent, I often skip the upload to Immich part. So I built a small tool to automatically upload to my Immich instance when I export from Capture One.

I was wondering if this could be something useful to release, and whether it would fit into your standard workflow. Right now it's rough but working. Making it "production-ready" would require some changes, so I'm trying to figure out if it makes sense to spend more time on it 😄

Note: I'm not affiliated with Immich or Capture One, but I'm building a few things around Immich for my personal use and publishing some of them.

Thanks, and have a nice day!