That’s true, any apps/services that use a database instead of files are more problematic. But then as you have done, you could build your own tooling to accomplish it. That’s quite a bit of effort, so it would have to be worth it for you.
I too like having file access whenever possible and prioritize it, for instance on the notes and wiki apps that I use like minimalist web notepad and dokuwiki… it’s nice to have access to the files directly. And similarly Immich didn’t have a good way to use your own directory structure for quite a while so I didn’t use it and instead I used PhotoPrism, but now there is a way to make that work with Immich. It took a bit more effort where I do the actual syncing of my phone’s photos with syncthing, and then have a cronjob running an immich --import to import them into Immich, but it works… and I’m happier because I get to maintain my existing directory structure of files.
That’s true, any apps/services that use a database instead of files are more problematic. But then as you have done, you could build your own tooling to accomplish it. That’s quite a bit of effort, so it would have to be worth it for you.
I too like having file access whenever possible and prioritize it, for instance on the notes and wiki apps that I use like minimalist web notepad and dokuwiki… it’s nice to have access to the files directly. And similarly Immich didn’t have a good way to use your own directory structure for quite a while so I didn’t use it and instead I used PhotoPrism, but now there is a way to make that work with Immich. It took a bit more effort where I do the actual syncing of my phone’s photos with syncthing, and then have a cronjob running an immich --import to import them into Immich, but it works… and I’m happier because I get to maintain my existing directory structure of files.