Immich on Android lost a week of photos due to background limits — version 3.0 adds a warning

A user who moved from Google Photos to the self-hosted Immich service found that their photo backups had silently stopped for several days. The issue was not with Immich itself but with Android's background process policy: the system forcibly put the app to sleep to save battery, so the scheduled upload of images never ran.

Immich performs synchronization through a background worker. Android by default restricts how long apps can run in the background, and when the system decides to suspend the app, the upload process does not start. Immich's documentation describes this as a known problem: some phone models are particularly strict about battery optimization, and developers point users to the Don't Kill My App resource for device-specific instructions.

The author admits he was aware of this Android behavior but still lost a week of backups. While troubleshooting, he installed Immich on a second phone and noticed that the setup flow now explicitly warns about possible interference from power-saving optimization. This notification arrived in version 3.0, which also introduced a periodic task scheduler that allows uploading an entire library in the background rather than only newly taken photos.

The fix required just two toggles in settings. The main one is disabling battery optimization for Immich via Settings > Apps > Immich > Battery. The second is granting notification access, which is needed for background tasks to work correctly. After these changes, synchronization resumed, and all photos from the missed period were uploaded without loss.

The incident highlights that even a reliable backup app can fail if operating system specifics are not accounted for. Users who rely on automatic media uploads should check their device's power-saving settings in advance to avoid a silent sync failure.