Difficulty with using non-default photo storage location for Immich

Insight & Feedback
1

Hello everyone,

I am quite impressed with ZimaOS so far, but I am running into an issue that I am unsure how to trouble shoot.

The question is trying to run Immich with the photo upload and storage to either a NAS or USB direct attached storage device. I will outline my setup below. I am able to successfully run and launch a default Immich (gallery), but I am unable to successfully launch the container if I change the default gallery file location to anywhere that is not on the onboard hard drive. Here is a snapshot of the custom install, I also tried to follow this guide without success.

I have a Plex container running without issues using media stored on the NAS. My presumption is some sort of permissions issue, but I am not sure why I would not have issues with Plex in that scenario.

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Currently arranged is ZimaOS running on a relatively newer laptop with mobile nvidia GPU with a USB-connected direct attached storage in hardware Raid1 configuration and on the network an ASUSTOR NAS.

I have DAS mounted as RAID1 and NAS as a LAN drive.

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Any hints or how to start troubleshooting would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

Tom

2

For an update, I did discover that my DAS was formatted in NTFS and may explain some permission issues, I am going to reformat to ext4 and see if that makes a difference

3

Hi Tom,

Yes, NTFS could definitely be part of the problem.

Plex can sometimes still work because it may only need read access to media files, but Immich needs reliable write access for uploads, thumbnails, encoded videos, database-related paths, and background jobs. Immich is much more sensitive to storage permissions and mount behaviour.

Reformatting the DAS to ext4 is a good next step, especially for direct-attached storage.

After reformatting, I would first confirm the real mount path and permissions before changing Immich again:

lsblk -f
findmnt
ls -la /media

Then check the exact folder you want Immich to use:

ls -la /path/to/your/immich/storage

For Immich, I would avoid using the NAS/LAN mount as the main upload library until the local DAS test is working. Start with the ext4 DAS first, confirm Immich can upload and generate thumbnails correctly, then test the NAS afterwards if needed.

Also make sure the path you enter in the ZimaOS custom install is the real mounted path, not just the display name shown in the UI.

A good test is to create a dedicated Immich folder on the DAS, for example:

mkdir -p /media/YOUR-DAS-NAME/immich/upload

Then use that exact path in the Immich storage bind mount.

If it still fails after ext4, the next useful things to share would be:

docker ps -a | grep -i immich
docker logs immich_server --tail=100
findmnt
ls -la /media/YOUR-DAS-NAME/immich

The key thing is to verify the actual mounted path and whether the Immich container can write to it.

4

Thank you for hints and tips. Once I reformatted the DAS to ext4, that seems to have been the primary issue. I have an install of Immich running with the photo upload on the DAS and appears to be working correctly.

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