A hidden power management setting in Android has been silently preventing photo backups on Immich, prompting recent updates to improve user guidance and background sync features.
A week of photos nearly vanished from Immich not because the service failed, but because Android quietly held the app back. The problem was uncovered only after a user went looking for a missing picture and found that the phone had stopped sending new images to the self-hosted backup service for days. The server was online, the app had not crashed and there was no obvious error message. The real obstacle was Android’s battery management.
That behaviour is consistent with how the platform treats background work. To save power, Android can suspend apps that are not in active use, which is usually sensible but awkward for software that must upload files on its own schedule. Immich’s own documentation acknowledges that Android battery optimisation can interfere with mobile backups and points users towards device-specific advice such as the “Don’t Kill My App” project. A GitHub issue also describes background sync failing even after battery optimisations were disabled, with uploads starting only when the app was opened manually.
Immich 3.0 has already started to address the problem with clearer setup prompts on Android. During installation, the app now asks for notification permission and warns that battery optimisation may affect backups. According to the project’s release notes, the mobile app also gained a new periodic scheduling system designed to keep background uploads moving, including for older photos and larger libraries. That matters because the failure mode is subtle: backups can appear normal until the user notices that days of images are still sitting only on the handset.
The practical fix is a combination of settings. On Android, Immich needs to be allowed unrestricted battery use so the system does not pause it between upload cycles. Notifications should also be enabled, because the app uses them to show backup progress and, on Android 13 and later, must ask for permission before sending them. A further setting inside the app can stop uploads being tied to charging, which helps avoid unwanted pauses. Immich is not a replacement for Google Photos in the sense that Google’s app often arrives with more permissive defaults, but for people running their own photo server, the lesson is clear: reliable backup depends as much on the phone’s operating rules as on the service itself. Some users on stricter Android builds, including reports involving Xiaomi and Samsung devices, still say backups can stall until the app is opened again.
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