Sync Lightroom albums to Immich with a publish service

A one-off export is enough for archiving. If your Immich albums should follow your Lightroom collections as you add, edit and remove photos, you need a publish service. The free Lightroom Immich Plugin includes one.

Export or publish

An export uploads photos once. A publish service keeps a link between a Lightroom collection and its destination. When you change the collection, the next publish applies the differences. This suits albums you maintain over time, for example a “Best of 2026” set, a client gallery or a portfolio.

If you only need a snapshot, export. If Immich is where you and others look at your photos, publish. The albums then follow how you curate in Lightroom.

Set up the publish service

In the Publish Services panel of Lightroom Classic, create a new service with the Immich plugin.
Enter your Immich server URL and API key.
Right-click the new service and create a published collection. Give it a name. The plugin creates a matching album in Immich.
Drag photos into the published collection and click Publish. The plugin uploads them to the Immich album.

From then on, every publish applies the changes you made to the collection.

To sync several albums, create one published collection per album in the same publish service. Each collection maps to one Immich album and is synced independently.

What gets synced

Each time you publish, the plugin:

creates, renames or deletes albums to match your published collections
uploads, updates or deletes images as the collection changes
downloads comments and likes from Immich into Lightroom, if the album is a shared album

If you rename a collection, the Immich album is renamed. If you remove a photo from the collection, the next publish removes it from the Immich album.

Tips

Duplicate detection prevents re-uploads when an image is already in Immich. It matches by Lightroom catalog ID, or by date and filename.
Enable stacking to group RAW and edited versions under a primary image, so the album does not show near-duplicates.
If a publish behaves unexpectedly, turn on Enable debug logging in the Plug-in Manager and click Show logfile. The log shows what the plugin sent to Immich.

If you have a question or want album sharing options in the publish settings, there is an open discussion for feature requests.