Immich v2.2

“The month following our stable release 🎉 has flown by!” and the energy within the Immich project is more palpable than ever. In an open-source landscape where many projects struggle to maintain a consistent cadence, Immich’s development pace continues to set an impressive standard. Building on the momentum of its major milestone, the team has delivered version v2.2.0, an update packed with highly-requested features and significant enhancements designed to make your self-hosted photo and video library more powerful, faster, and easier to use.

This release introduces a game-changing search capability with Optical Character Recognition (OCR), delivers major performance boosts to the web interface, and refines the user experience across both web and mobile platforms. Let’s dive into the highlights of this exciting release.

Feature Deep Dive: What’s New in v2.2.0

The Power of Sight: Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Arrives

Optical Character Recognition search has consistently been one of the most requested features from the Immich community. Its arrival in v2.2.0 marks a significant leap forward, adding a powerful new dimension to Immich’s already robust search capabilities. Thanks to the fantastic work of community contributors @flipped-1121 and @mertalev, this complex feature is now a reality.

This new function allows Immich to recognize and index text found within your images, making previously unsearchable content instantly discoverable. The practical value is immense, empowering you to find those “lost family recipes or a crypto wallet’s passphrase” with a simple text search. The OCR pipeline is seamlessly integrated into the existing machine learning flow and runs automatically for all new uploads.

To get started with OCR:

• For existing libraries: Navigate to Administration > Job and click “All” for the OCR job to extract text information from your entire gallery.
• To perform a search: On the web app, simply select the new radio button for text search. On the mobile app, choose the text option from the search type dropdown list.

OCR officially supports the following languages:

• English
• Chinese (Simplified)
• Chinese (Traditional)
• Japanese

It is important to note that languages using Latin script generally work as well, but may have lower accuracy or interpret characters without the diacritics. While OCR unlocks information within your photos, the next enhancement ensures you can access your entire library faster than ever before.

Web Speed Unleashed: A Blazing-Fast Gallery Experience

A fast and fluid user interface is critical for an enjoyable experience, especially for users managing very large photo and video libraries. This release directly addresses this by introducing a Wasm (WebAssembly) implementation for the justified layout calculation on the web.

This core technical enhancement makes calculating thumbnail sizes “several times faster” than the previous method. For the user, this translates into a tangible and dramatic improvement in responsiveness. It means “significantly improving the rendering performance for a large bucket,” ensuring that galleries containing tens of thousands of assets will now load much more quickly and feel incredibly fluid to navigate. This newfound speed in the main gallery is matched by a more refined and informative interface for managing your collection, starting with the duplicates screen.

Refined Duplicates Review: Making Decisions Easier and Faster

Managing duplicate photos can be a challenging task, and making confident decisions requires clear and comprehensive information. The v2.2.0 release introduces significant UI improvements to the duplicates review screen, providing the critical metadata signals needed for confident and swift decision-making. To help you decide which asset to keep, the following information is now clearly displayed:

• Date/Time
• Location
• Number of albums the asset belongs to

Furthermore, the info section has been visually redesigned with highlighted properties, allowing you to scan the critical information much faster and make more intuitive decisions when cleaning up your library. These web-based improvements for library management are mirrored on our mobile apps, which gain a suite of powerful new features in this release.

Major Mobile UX Enhancements: Power in Your Pocket

The v2.2.0 release delivers significant user experience upgrades directly to the mobile apps, bringing popular web features to your fingertips and refining existing interactions for a more polished feel on the go.

Show Similar Photos

The popular “Show similar photos” feature from the web interface has now been implemented in the mobile app. This allows you to instantly find visually similar images directly from an asset’s detail sheet, making it easier to discover related content in your library.

Album Navigation from Asset Details

Organization and context are key. You can now view and navigate to all the albums an asset belongs to directly from its info sheet. This simple but powerful addition makes it easier to understand how your photos are organized and to jump between related collections.

Chat-Style Album Activity

The album activity view has been completely redesigned with a “chat-style” layout. This modern interface makes following messages, comments, and other actions within a shared album more intuitive and much easier to read at a glance.

High-Precision Video Seeking

The mobile video player has received a major upgrade. New high-precision duration handling makes seeking through videos “much more fluid” than before. This results in smooth progress bar updates, eliminating the previous second-by-second jumps and providing a superior viewing experience.

Enhanced Administrative Flexibility

To streamline server management, Immich v2.2.0 adds more flexibility for administrators. The release introduces the “Option to create a new user as an admin,” simplifying the process of setting up new administrative accounts without requiring extra steps after user creation.

Version v2.2.0

At PixelUnion, we are now rolling out the upgrade to version v2.2.0 for all PixelUnion Immich instances. This release represents a significant step forward in Immich’s evolution, delivering powerful new features, major performance enhancements, and refined user experiences across web and mobile platforms.