Reverse Geocoding breaks when performing backup & restore procedure

[toennema]

The bug

Dear all, I only recently discovered Immich and must first give everyone contributing to it a big compliment. It's a reat application and I really like it so far. I am however struggeling to set everything up without breaking a feature. I am running it on an Rpi 4b with Docker Compose and do the machine learning part on a remote computer with a better CPU.

I am still getting used to how Docker works and how to create backups of my setup. I had to restart importing my images multiple times, due to different noob errors I did. What I however noticed recently seems like a bug.

I am not 100% percent sure if the error is related to the official backup & restore procedure described here, but it seems to me that it might be the reason (it happened already twice during initital import of all my pictures):
https://immich.app/docs/administration/backup-and-restore

What stops working (maybe after the restore) is the "add location" feature, at least the reverse geocoding part. I can set a location based on the map, but the search for a specific location by name doesn't work anymore. This is a pity because then these places don't get add to the "explore" page and can also not be searched for.

I noticed also upon restore the following error messages already described here:
https://immich.app/docs/administration/backup-and-restore

I don't know if this is really related though. At least the description of the backup procedure on the official immich website has so far not been updated according to the finding/fix described in this post.

Running currently again my import from scratch, hope to not break anything again. Fingers crossed.

The OS that Immich Server is running on

Debian

Version of Immich Server

v1.101.0

Version of Immich Mobile App

v1.101.0

Platform with the issue

• Server
• Web
• Mobile

Your docker-compose.yml content

#
# WARNING: Make sure to use the docker-compose.yml of the current release:
#
# https://github.com/immich-app/immich/releases/latest/download/docker-compose.yml
#
# The compose file on main may not be compatible with the latest release.
#

name: immich

services:
  immich-server:
    container_name: immich_server
    image: ghcr.io/immich-app/immich-server:${IMMICH_VERSION:-release}
    command: ['start.sh', 'immich']
    volumes:
      - ${UPLOAD_LOCATION}:/usr/src/app/upload
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
    env_file:
      - .env
    ports:
      - 2283:3001
    depends_on:
      - redis
      - database
    restart: always

  immich-microservices:
    container_name: immich_microservices
    image: ghcr.io/immich-app/immich-server:${IMMICH_VERSION:-release}
    # extends: # uncomment this section for hardware acceleration - see https://immich.app/docs/features/hardware-transcoding
    #   file: hwaccel.transcoding.yml
    #   service: cpu # set to one of [nvenc, quicksync, rkmpp, vaapi, vaapi-wsl] for accelerated transcoding
    command: ['start.sh', 'microservices']
    volumes:
      - ${UPLOAD_LOCATION}:/usr/src/app/upload
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
    env_file:
      - .env
    depends_on:
      - redis
      - database
    restart: always

  immich-machine-learning:
    container_name: immich_machine_learning
    # For hardware acceleration, add one of -[armnn, cuda, openvino] to the image tag.
    # Example tag: ${IMMICH_VERSION:-release}-cuda
    image: ghcr.io/immich-app/immich-machine-learning:${IMMICH_VERSION:-release}
    # extends: # uncomment this section for hardware acceleration - see https://immich.app/docs/features/ml-hardware-acceleration
    #   file: hwaccel.ml.yml
    #   service: cpu # set to one of [armnn, cuda, openvino, openvino-wsl] for accelerated inference - use the `-wsl` version for WSL2 where applicable
    volumes:
      - model-cache:/cache
    env_file:
      - .env
    restart: always

  redis:
    container_name: immich_redis
    image: registry.hub.docker.com/library/redis:6.2-alpine@sha256:51d6c56749a4243096327e3fb964a48ed92254357108449cb6e23999c37773c5
    restart: always

  database:
    container_name: immich_postgres
    image: registry.hub.docker.com/tensorchord/pgvecto-rs:pg14-v0.2.0@sha256:90724186f0a3517cf6914295b5ab410db9ce23190a2d9d0b9dd6463e3fa298f0
    environment:
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: ${DB_PASSWORD}
      POSTGRES_USER: ${DB_USERNAME}
      POSTGRES_DB: ${DB_DATABASE_NAME}
    volumes:
      - pgdata:/var/lib/postgresql/data
    restart: always

volumes:
  pgdata:
  model-cache:

Your .env content

# You can find documentation for all the supported env variables at https://immich.app/docs/install/environment-variables

# The location where your uploaded files are stored
UPLOAD_LOCATION=./upload

# The Immich version to use. You can pin this to a specific version like "v1.71.0"
IMMICH_VERSION=release

# Connection secret for postgres. You should change it to a random password
DB_PASSWORD=postgres

# The values below this line do not need to be changed
###################################################################################
DB_HOSTNAME=immich_postgres
DB_USERNAME=postgres
DB_DATABASE_NAME=immich

REDIS_HOSTNAME=immich_redis

Reproduction steps

1. Do backup & restore procedure according to description on official website
2. Try to do a location search when selecting "add location" on a picture
3. Search will not give a list of possible locations from GeoNames

Additional information

No response

[mmomjian]

Hello, thanks for reaching out. Please share details, such as container logs, the exact backup and restore commands you ran, and all the error messages you are now seeing.

[toennema]

yes, sorry. I forgot this. Command used to create the backup file was:
docker exec -t immich_postgres pg_dumpall -c -U postgres | gzip > "/media/pi/My Book/immich_backup/dump.sql.gz"

[mmomjian]

Please try again using the commands in the current documentation and let us know how that works.

[mmomjian]

If that doesn't work, try running docker exec -i immich_postgres psql --user=postgres -c 'SET search_path TO "$user",public;' before running the gunzip < "/path/to/backup/dump.sql.gz" | docker exec -i immich_postgres psql --username=postgres command

[toennema]

Ups. You are right. I didn't notice that they had been a change in the official documentation to create the backup. What has seemed to work however with the backup dump created when using the old command was to run the following:

gunzip < "/media/pi/My Book/immich_backup/dump.sql.gz" | \ sed "s/SELECT pg_catalog.set_config('search_path', '', false);/SELECT pg_catalog.set_config('search_path', 'public, pg_catalog', true);/g" | \ docker exec -i immich_postgres psql -U postgres -d immich

I just also ran the updated command in the docs:
sudo docker exec -t immich_postgres pg_dumpall --clean --if-exists --username=postgres | gzip > "/media/pi/My Book/immich_backup/dump.sql.gz"

I can report that this DOESN'T work. Result is the same as before that Reverse Geocoding is broken.

[mmomjian]

Thanks for that update. That's helpful. We will update the documentation. The new command wouldn't have fixed this error, now that we know what it is.