How to automatically sync screenshots from the Steamdeck to Immich

As part of my ongoing effort to reduce my dependency on US services, I just moved my photos from Google Photos to a self-hosted immich instance (which I btw can only recommend so far).

You might remember from a previous TIL that I had my Steamdeck configured to push my screenshots into a custom album on Google Photos. Obviously I had to change that now as well, but sadly couldn’t use the existing rclone-based setup for it.

My first idea was to utilize immich-go, as I have just successfully used that for the three day long import of over 50000 pictures from my Google Photos takeout into immich. But that turned out to not be the right tool here: in order to not even try to upload already existing files it will fetch an asset list from immich first, and while that really improves performance for large batch imports, it takes way too long for uploading a single new screenshot.

So instead I went with something self-built which utilizes immich’s API.

A custom upload script

The first part is this little bash script that will take a file as input, upload it to a pre-configured immich instance and also add it to a pre-defined album (which already has to exist). This lives in ~/.local/bin/immich-upload.sh:

#!/bin/bash
set -e

IMMICH_SERVER="https://immich.example.com"
IMMICH_KEY="your api key goes here"
IMMICH_ALBUM="your album id goes here"

INPUT="$1"
if [ "$INPUT" == "" ]; then
    echo "immich-upload.sh <file>"
    exit 0
fi

file_modified=$(stat -c %Y "$INPUT" | date --iso-8601=seconds)
name=$(basename "$INPUT")

# ---

echo "Uploading $INPUT to immich..."

upload=$(curl -sL --request POST "$IMMICH_SERVER/api/assets" \
    -H "Content-Type: multipart/form-data" \
    -H "Accept: application/json" \
    -H "X-API-Key: $IMMICH_KEY" \
    -F "deviceId=\"curl/steamdeck\"" \
    -F "deviceAssetId=\"$name-$file_modified\"" \
    -F "fileCreatedAt=\"$file_modified\"" \
    -F "fileModifiedAt=\"$file_modified\"" \
    -F "assetData=@\"$INPUT\"")

id=$(echo "$upload" | jq -r .id)

echo "Uploaded file, asset id is $id"

# ---

echo "Adding file to album $IMMICH_ALBUM..."

payload=$(jq -n --arg id $id '{ids:[$ARGS.named.id]}')
album=$(curl -sL --request PUT "$IMMICH_SERVER/api/albums/$IMMICH_ALBUM/assets" \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -H "Accept: application/json" \
    -H "X-API-Key: $IMMICH_KEY" \
    -d "$payload")

echo "... done"

Reacting to new screenshots

I use watchexec to listen for changes in my custom screenshot folder (see this TIL post on how to set that up) and calling the upload script with the correct file name. I downloaded a release build of watchexec and threw it into ~/.local/bin, then created another script ~/.local/bin/sync-screenshots that takes care of setting all of the correct parameters¹:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

WATCHEXEC="${HOME}/.local/bin/watchexec"
FOLDER="${HOME}/.steam_screenshots"

${WATCHEXEC} --exts jpg,png,mp4 --fs-events create --emit-events-to environment -w $FOLDER -o queue -p -v -- '/home/deck/.local/bin/immich-upload.sh "$WATCHEXEC_COMMON_PATH/$WATCHEXEC_CREATED_PATH"'

Putting it all together

Finally, a new systemd unit in ~/.config/systemd/user/sync-screenshots.service takes care of starting this bash script and keeping it running:

[Unit]
Description=Sync Steam Screenshots

[Service]
ExecStart=%h/.local/bin/sync-screenshots
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=5

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

I enabled and started that:

systemctl --user enable sync-screenshots
systemctl --user start sync-screenshots

Then I took a screenshot and confirmed that the script had run:

Mar 25 15:17:03 steamdeck sync_screenshots[77135]: [Running: /home/deck/.local/bin/immich-upload.sh "$WATCHEXEC_COMMON_PATH/$WATCHEXEC_CREATED_PATH"]
Mar 25 15:17:03 steamdeck sync_screenshots[77188]: Uploading /home/deck/.steam_screenshots/7_20250325151703_1.png to immich...
Mar 25 15:17:04 steamdeck sync_screenshots[77188]: Uploaded file, asset id is 141dc605-edef-48f1-83b5-00bd9d72b13e
Mar 25 15:17:04 steamdeck sync_screenshots[77188]: Adding file to album 0ce35e68-a564-4e26-921e-c486cd9e4725...
Mar 25 15:17:05 steamdeck sync_screenshots[77188]: ... done
Mar 25 15:17:05 steamdeck sync_screenshots[77135]: [Command was successful]

And indeed, upon checking my immich instance, I was also looking at the freshly uploaded screenshot. Mission accomplished!