[Enhancement] Please document bulk importing of files

[NucleaPeon]

Explain in a few words which functionality or improvements you would like to see in Lychee.

I was looking for a way to import a very large collection of images I've accumulated over a decade or two, I'm talking over 70k 350k images. I wanted a quick way to import them into Lychee 4.13.0 which I just set up and configured.
I saw a few github projects that were discontinued and I read around on the docs and here on this github project. Not until I read this issue here: #1238 did I see that there is a php artisan lychee:sync /image_dir --import_via_symlink=1 --skip_duplicates=1 command that seems to be doing what I need.

Maybe I didn't see it if it was mentioned somewhere, but this is a very useful command and I'd personally have a note on your main README.md file on how to import bulk directories of files. The web interface can only seem to do selections of files and not directories for upload.

I'd also love to see an upload by directory feature in the web ui, but I'm happy so far with the above command.

[NucleaPeon]

I did just see that it is documented here: https://lycheeorg.github.io/docs/faq_general.html#can-i-set-up-lychee-to-watch-a-folder-for-new-images-and-automatically-add-them-to-albums

It seems a little buried; if it's a frequently asked question, perhaps it should have more visibility such having a FAQ section within the readme itself. Currently there's a link in the troubleshooting section to the faq, but that doesn't seem intuitive. Perhaps it could be put in the Getting Started guide section instead?

Just my 2 cents, I'm thankful for the work you all are putting in.

[ildyria]

Hi, thank you for the heads up.
If you feel you can improve the situation, we will happily take your pull request to https://github.com/LycheeOrg/LycheeOrg.github.io

I really don't have the time to work on this. :(

[x1ntt]

It would be great if you could directly upload the folder on the front-end page and keep the folder's tree structure mapped to an album.
Compressing packages is also possible, mainly for backup work before upgrading the device, or for archiving files

[ildyria]

I am thinking about uploading zip files, and then extract on backend followed by import but that is more of a long term thing to add.

[guidallambert]

Th artisan sync command has worked for me, but it takes a very very long time to skip over old files, of which there are thousands in my collection. So importing 50 new photos using the sync command in practice takes hours. Is there a workaround or a solution? Can the duplicate detection be sped up? It is because it's using Md5 or something slow?

[d7415]

Th artisan sync command has worked for me, but it takes a very very long time to skip over old files, of which there are thousands in my collection. So importing 50 new photos using the sync command in practice takes hours. Is there a workaround or a solution? Can the duplicate detection be sped up? It is because it's using Md5 or something slow?

There should be a fairly big speed up in 6.5.0 thanks to #3209.

[guidallambert]

Thank you that's interesting and I'll do some testing.

In the mean time in your linked issue there's an example of using artisan sync with an album_id= option; that could be v helpful, but can we also use album_name=MyAlbum or something similar? album_id could be a way to do it but I don't know how you'd look it up? Can albums and album ids be created and queried from the cmdline?

Apologies for questions but I'm struggling to find the documentation on this and I'm not sure of the right place to ask.

[x1ntt]

Thank you that's interesting and I'll do some testing.

In the mean time in your linked issue there's an example of using artisan sync with an album_id= option; that could be v helpful, but can we also use album_name=MyAlbum or something similar? album_id could be a way to do it but I don't know how you'd look it up? Can albums and album ids be created and queried from the cmdline?

Apologies for questions but I'm struggling to find the documentation on this and I'm not sure of the right place to ask.

I saw your needs. I happened to be developing a lychee library for python3 recently, and also provided a simple command line tool. It is here x1ntt/pychee6

It has not been developed yet, so it has not been internationalized yet, so you may need to translate the software. It is a wrapper of the lychee api, and provides some functions such as uploading and downloading albums, and can directly pass the album path (which means you can access the album using /first-level album/second-level album)

You can tell me your needs. As its first user, I will prioritize your needs.