I searched for a photo from the weekend and found that my Immich backup was several days out of date. Nothing had warned me, and nothing looked broken.
It hadn’t been long since I’d ditched Google Photos to self-host with Immich, and the migration had taken quite a bit of effort. So, watching it quietly stop working after a few weeks was deflating.
During that time, I attended several events and had taken more than a few photos I wanted to keep. Only my habit of delaying storage cleanup had stopped me deleting any of it from the phone.
The problem turned out to have nothing to do with Immich or my server. My phone had been shutting the app down, and I hadn’t told it not to.
Why Android was the problem, not Immich
Background workers get killed by design
Android limits how long apps can run in the background, and it does that on purpose. Every phone is built to optimize battery life, so the system decides which apps get runtime and which get suspended.
For most apps, that’s fine. However, for anything that needs to wake up on a schedule and move files, it’s what decides whether the app works.
Immich’s Android backup runs as a background worker. When the system decides to put the app to sleep, that worker doesn’t run, which means photos won’t leave the phone.
Immich’s own documentation is clear about this, calling it a well-known problem that some Android models are very strict with battery optimization, and pointing users to Don’t Kill My App for device-specific instructions.
This isn’t new information. I’ve read several versions of this problem before, yet I still lost a week of backups.
What version 3.0 changed
The app now warns you at setup
I installed Immich on a second Android device during troubleshooting. I expected to watch it fail the same way. Instead, the setup flow stopped me.
The app asked for notification access, then warned that battery optimization could interfere with backups. That prompt had been on-screen during my original setup, and I’d skipped it while getting everything else running.
The warning arrived in version 3.0, alongside a new periodic task scheduler that lets Android upload an entire library in the background rather than only newly taken photos.
I’d been ready to conclude I was wrong about replacing Google Photos, but the fix was two toggles that I forgot to set.
The two settings that fixed it
Battery first, then notifications
Battery optimization is the more important setting. I went to Settings > Apps > Immich > Battery and set it to Unrestricted, which stops the system putting the app to sleep between upload runs.
That small change uploaded the missing week within a few hours. Since then, everything else has worked on schedule.
Notifications are a little bit messier. Immich’s release notes say the app warns you when battery optimization and notification settings might interfere with backups, and the commit that added the warning shows the battery prompt only appears after notification permission is granted.
However, the developers haven’t published a mechanism. Immich’s backup documentation spells out the battery side in detail and says nothing about notifications, so I can tell you the app asks for them, but I can’t tell you exactly what breaks without them.
Android has required apps to request permission before posting notifications since Android 13, and Immich reports upload progress through one. I granted it, and I’ve had no failures since.
I usually disable notifications for most apps since they tend to be very distracting, so I expected to regret this. But I was pleased to find out that the alerts are silent progress updates which I only see if I actually look for them.
One more setting to check is the Backup settings on the Immich app. There’s a toggle under Background Options to require the device to be charged before backups can run. Disabling this check covers all your bases.
Why this affects self-hosters specifically
Google’s apps never have to ask
Google Photos never needed me to do any of this. Its permissions and exemptions are set from the moment the phone boots, and I’d have to go out of my way to break them.
Everything else must ask, and most people skip this step. Battery optimization isn’t a bug or a hostile design choice, and that’s exactly why it slips past you. It’s a useful feature that happens to work against what I want on this one app.
Unfortunately, the settings fix doesn’t seem to work for every Android phone. There are open reports of background backup failing on some Xiaomi and Samsung devices with every permission already granted. Uploads only resume when the app is opened manually.
Both my Samsung and Pixel phones have been reliable since the change. If you’re on a phone with aggressive vendor power management, prepare for more troubleshooting than two toggles.
The warning matters more than the fix
The fix here is old news, documented for years across forums and Immich’s docs, and I still lost a week of photos to it.
The difference is that in version 3.0 is that the app now says something during setup instead of leaving you to work it out afterwards. This reduces a source of friction with newcomers, where a rough first month might lead them to decide the change is not worth it.
For one, I’m glad the fix is unglamorous, and that’s why I’m comfortable moving more of my digital life onto hardware I own.
