I'm writing this so I can search up this answer in 2 years when I need the information again. If this helps anyone else, you're welcome! I would also love to hear any suggestions for improving this setup.

This guide is NOT about running the QNAP Container Station. This is for mounting the //NAS/Photots to your Immich server (docker) which is a separate machine. Some of the info here is probably applicable to the other situation though.

Make sure permissions are set up correctly on the QNAP NAS (Privileges > Shared Folders)

1. Read only (we don't want Immich to accidentally mess something up
2. Squash All Users is the magic option which is going to let non-root users on the remote system view the files
3. Only open it up to your local network (mine, in this case is 192.168.1.x represented by 192.168.1.0/24)

Mount the NFS drive on the HOST machine where the docker container will be started

1. Create the folder

sudo mkdir -p /mnt/photos

2. Make sure you have the nfs utils installed:
   Ubuntu 24.04:

sudo apt install nfs-common

(note: this is different on other distros, you're looking for whatever package gets you mount for nfs)

4. Test the mount

# 192.168.1.2 is my NAS ip address
sudo mount -t nfs -O "auto,nofail,noatime,nolock,intr,tcp,actimeo=1800" 192.168.1.2:Photos /mnt/photos
ls -ll /mnt/photos
# you should see a listing of directories/photos now

5. Make the mount permanent

sudo vim /etc/fstab
# Add the following line
192.168.1.2:/Photos   /mnt/photos     nfs     _netdev,x-systemd.automount,auto,nofail,noatime,nolock,intr,tcp,actimeo=1800    0       0

In my case, after some troubleshooting with network, I had to prepend _netdev,x-systemd.automount to the previously tested manual mount. This was on a Ubuntu 24.04 system, YMMV.
6. Reboot and validate that your mount is still there as a non-root user.

Add the External Library

Do the steps here: https://immich.app/docs/guides/external-library. Summary of steps:

Added to .env:

# Mounted NFS drives from QNAP
EXTERNAL_PATH_PHOTOS=/mnt/photos

Added to docker-compose.yml:

  immich-server:
    ...
    volumes:
      ...
      - ${EXTERNAL_PATH_PHOTOS}:/mnt/photos:ro

Configure the External Library

1. Add an import path to our mounted/remounted NFS drive: /mnt/photos
2. Add the following exclusions under "Scan Settings" to skip over QNAP "stuff":

• /mnt/photos/**/@Recycle
• /mnt/photos/**/.@__thumb