Download design issue

[jonas-jasas]

The bug

The Immich web interface first downloads images, videos, or albums to memory before saving them to the drive. This approach makes it impossible to download even relatively small pieces of data on mobile devices and becomes an issue on desktops when dealing with larger albums.

The OS that Immich Server is running on

Any

Version of Immich Server

Any

Version of Immich Mobile App

Any

Platform with the issue

• Server
• Web
• Mobile

Your docker-compose.yml content

Design issue

Your .env content

Design issue

Reproduction steps

1. Download larger album

Relevant log output

No response

Additional information

No response

[akostadinov]

Just FYI, a related issue is that in incognito mode, downloading large files fails.

For example a 2.6GB file outright fails to be downloaded in a Chrome incognito window. And in a Firefox 131 private window it downloads without error but resulting file is a corrupted one of size ~2GB (which is worse because one doesn't expect corrupted files without error).

[jonas-jasas]

By fixing this design issue all other issues will be solved automatically.
Looking forward for this issue to be fixed.

[steve4835]

Just my 2 cents. While this is absolutely a valid issue that should be fixed, I will add that by downloading directly to disk instead of saving to memory first, it would not be able (as far as I know) to show the download progress in the Immich UI as it does now. Maybe add a tweak that checks the file size before downloading and if it is over a certain amount, download it directly to disk, but otherwise keep the current behavior.

[akostadinov]

Your browser shows you progress if you care about it. I see no value in another popup. On upload it is a different story. There the progress is important together with the end result.Because these are not reported by the browser.

[steve4835]

I don't disagree with that. It looks nicer when it's integrated with the web UI though.

[mertalev]

I agree the best solution would be to leave download progress to the browser. There's no practical reason to require the entire download to fit in RAM.