The Problem

I had Immich running on my home server. Then I lost the configuration files. But I still had 5,700+ photos sitting on a NAS somewhere, and I needed them back in a working Immich installation.

Also, the new Immich v2.4.1 setup wouldn’t connect. Connection refused. Great start.

Fixing Connection Issues

Issue #1: Missing Hostname Variables

After running docker compose up, the web interface wouldn’t load. Checking logs revealed:

Ever tried to explain Object-Oriented Programming to someone and watched their eyes glaze over? Yeah, me too. So here’s a different approach: let’s talk about cakes.

Classes Are Cookie Cutters

Think about it - a class is like a cookie cutter or cake mold. It’s the template that defines the shape, but it’s not the actual cookie. You can use the same mold to make dozens of cookies, each one unique but following the same basic pattern.

The Realization

I’ve been doing broadcast infrastructure for years. Managing video streams, metadata pipelines, transcoding workflows, monitoring systems. Turns out, that’s all just ETL with different names.

So why not learn how actual data engineers solve these problems?

What I’m Actually Doing

Learning better tools for stuff I already do

Broadcast infrastructure already involves:

• Moving large amounts of data reliably (video files aren’t small)
• Transforming data (transcoding, metadata extraction)
• Loading it somewhere useful (archives, CDNs, databases)
• Monitoring everything so you know when it breaks

That’s literally Extract-Transform-Load. Just with video instead of CSV files.