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Your First Memory

This walks you through creating a video from start to finish. Takes about 15 minutes total: 5 to set up, 10 for the generation.

Prerequisites​

Before you start:

  • Immich running with an API key (Account Settings > API Keys > New API Key)
  • Docker or Python 3.11+ installed
  • ~2 GB free disk for the video cache (downloaded clips get cached locally)
  • At least 20-30 videos in your Immich library for the time period you want

Step 1: Launch​

Docker (recommended):

# Create a .env file
cat > .env << 'EOF'
IMMICH_URL=https://photos.example.com
IMMICH_API_KEY=your-api-key-here
EOF

# Download and start
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sam-dumont/immich-video-memory-generator/main/docker-compose.yml
docker compose up -d

Or native install:

uvx immich-memories ui

Open http://localhost:8080 in your browser.

Step 2: Connect to Immich​

Enter your Immich server URL and API key in the Configuration tab. Click connect. A green checkmark confirms the connection.

Connected to ImmichConnected to Immich

Step 3: Pick "Year in Review"​

Select the Year in Review preset card. Pick the year you want (the one with the most videos works best for a first try). This preset covers an entire calendar year and creates monthly title dividers in the output.

Step 4: Review clips​

Go to Step 2 (Clip Review). The pipeline will fetch your videos, analyze them, and score each clip. This takes 1-3 minutes depending on how many videos you have.

Once done, you'll see a grid of clips sorted by score. The best ones are pre-selected. You can deselect clips you don't want or re-include ones the AI skipped.

Reviewing selected clipsReviewing selected clips

Step 5: Set options​

Move to Step 3 (Generation Options). The defaults work well for a first video:

  • Resolution: 1080p (the default)
  • Transition: Smart (mixes cuts and crossfades based on clip content)
  • Music: Auto-generated if you have a music backend configured, or upload your own

You can leave everything at defaults. The only setting worth changing on your first run: if you have a specific MP3 you want as background music, upload it here.

Step 6: Generate​

Hit Generate in Step 4. The progress bar shows four phases:

  1. Downloading clips from Immich (cached for next time)
  2. Assembling the video with transitions and title screens
  3. Mixing music (if configured)
  4. Done: video ready to watch
Generation in progressGeneration in progress

30 clips at 1080p takes about 8 minutes on an M2 Pro, 15 minutes on a NAS-grade Celeron. 4K roughly doubles the time.

Step 7: Watch​

When it's done, the built-in video player shows your result. You can download the MP4 directly or (if configured) upload it back to an Immich album.

What just happened?​

The pipeline ran four phases: fetch (downloaded videos from Immich via its API, read-only), analyze (scored each clip on motion, faces, audio, and optionally LLM content understanding), select (picked the best segments and distributed them across the time period), assemble (encoded everything with FFmpeg using the streaming assembler, which keeps memory under 550 MB even at 4K).

The analysis results are cached in a local SQLite database. Next time you generate a video for the same time period, analysis is instant because the scores are already stored.

Next steps​