I am only a solo user that tried similar recovery.

There are several jobs in the admin section, one of them is "migrate the storage template" or something like this. I think that thing might do what you want. I would check that it is set properly depending on what you were using previously and rerun in. https://immich.app/docs/administration/storage-template/

I also wanted to mention that normally Immich dumps its own db into a file backup file somewhere. I forgot where. Check the database dump backup cron job in the settings.

You can always add them as a external library

This does not help you but it makes me think of this:

I understand why it makes technical sense to do so but immich storing things in a database in general is more nuisance then practical.

We want those fotos accessible in our own file system where we have full control of what is what.

Immich job is to put the pictures from a phone to the server and also to display all pictures within a certain directory.

It does a good job at both. Having your own file structure is not a problem and it seem to even know and adapt if pics get moved around.

But we have to manually move the photos out of its own structure into our own every time we do a big upload.

Maybe i can set something up with syslinks so it all appears centralized as a big “upload” folder to be sorted.

You can add your existing photos as an external library after starting from scratch with Immich, they'll show up just like before.

Is immich still container-dependent?