How to use Immich to delete original files on device?

[825i]

I have gone through and deleted hundreds of photos using Immich in my external library, just to find out that they are only deleted from Immich and not at all from my actual device. The whole reason I got this app was to be able to blaze through my photo timeline and mass delete images that I don't care about. I obviously want those images removed forever.

When checking the settings I can't see anywhere to actually delete the original files.

Is this seriously not a feature at all? What is the point of deleting photos in Immich if the junk files, duplicates, blurry photos etc. are all still taking up storage on my server/device?

[bo0tzz]

There's a few things at play here:

1. Files in external libraries are deleted from disk only if the library is not mounted readonly
2. Files in external libraries have no link to files on your phone - Immich only knows about that connection if they got uploaded through the app
3. If you delete a file from the mobile app, you get the option to also delete it locally on the phone
4. Deletes from the web/server are currently not propagated to the phone automatically. At the moment this is a concious choice, because we're dealing with important data and we don't want to risk a bug being able to accidentally delete all of it. Once Immich is more stable, we will implement a cleanup feature, see also [Feature] Mass remove already backed-up photos #165.

[MCDELTAT]

3. If you delete a file from the mobile app, you get the option to also delete it locally on the phone

@bo0tzz Happy Holidays. Can you clarify "...you get the option..."? I just configured Immich today on TrueNAS. I'm running server v1.119.1 and the lastest app on iOS 18.2.0. I synced some ~1,000 photos to Immich. I then try to delete a few in the app. I see them go away on the server, they do not go away from my local device. Is that supposed to be a thing? Is it a setting somewhere?

[bo0tzz]

When you select assets you get a few different deletion options.

[MCDELTAT]

Gotcha. I’ll file this as a big against the iOS app then.

On the iOS app those options aren’t available. The delete goes to the trash. When you select an individual photo in the trash to delete it, you get the warning “These items will be deleted permanently deleted from Immich and from your device.”

Going back to the iOS photos app, I can see all deleted images still there.

[ChocolateLoverRaj]

#11047 (reply in thread) - Nice, I just learned about this. So you have to do the select multiple (even if it's just selecting 1) option to get the specific delete options. It would be nice if the delete button in the single photo view also showed you 3 options for deleting instead of just deleting from cloud and local.

[MCDELTAT]

@ChocolateLoverRaj I can confirm that I found those settings in the UI if you select things. However, it also isn't deleting from my phone in the server/app combo I'm using.

[825i]

Ok I figured some of this out. I had mounted in Unraid the external library as Read Only.
After remounting as Read/Write. Deleting from the trash now does delete the original file.

However, I am having a second issue that despite the "/thumbs" DIR already having been mounted as Read/Write from the beginning. I am getting an EACCESS error that it cannot delete the thumb files when the image is deleted from the trash and the disk.

Is the process runner responsible for deleting the thumb file, running under a different user/process than what deletes the actual photo file?