Is creating thumbnails necessary?

[exotic walrus]

I installed Immich on a Synology and I'm in the testing phase. My external library is 800 GB with 156 000 files. My docker container was started yesterday and is at 42 GB with 165 000 files and counting. I assume that's all the thumbnails. But why is it really creating those? Can't it behave like in Windows when you open a photos folder and it generates temp thumbnails on the fly (if that's really what's happening)? I'm just trying to make sense of all this. 🙂

[stone basin]

:wave: Hey @exotic walrus,

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References

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• Code Formatting https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/210298617-Markdown-Text-101-Chat-Formatting-Bold-Italic-Underline#h_01GY0DAKGXDEHE263BCAYEGFJA

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[manic yoke]

Can't it behave like in Windows when you open a photos folder and it generates temp thumbnails on the fly
That would make for a miserable browsing experience

We do everything ahead of time so that when you go to use Immich everything's as fast as it can possibly be

[exotic walrus]

That makes sense. Is it the Preview (Webp) that's displayed when browsing or Thumbnail (Jpeg)?

[stone basin]

Successfully submitted, a tag has been added to inform contributors. :white_check_mark:

[manic yoke]

The webp is used for the small display in the timeline etc, the jpeg is used for larger display (eg viewing) as well as for things like ML

[exotic walrus]

I guess I'll just have to wait and see but if it's creating 3 files for each picture, 800 GB pictures will be about 120 GB in thumbnails if my calculating is somewhat accurate.

But I guess it makes sense to have a jpeg instead of showing the original photo to have faster loading.

[thick cove]

Are you transcoding as well? I just run the thumbnails and they're quite small compared to my library. Think just under 50gb for approx 1tb of storage (videos not transcoded)

[exotic walrus]

Yeah, transcoding was on by default it seems

It's set to only transcode unsupported files though

[thick cove]

The contents of that would be in ./encoded-video

[verbal charm]

If the issue is storage, you can choose to put files created by Immich on different drives. For example, video and photo files would be on the HDD and thumbnails image files would be on the SSD for a faster experience.

[verbal charm]

I'm not so sure if I understood your point.
The HDD only comes into operation (rotation of the platters) when you open the video through the user interface.

[thick cove]

My apologies I read your message wrong. You are absolutely correct

[exotic walrus]

Thanks guys!