Your Immich photo library as a native cloud drive in File Explorer — on demand, without storing the photos on your PC.
Take a photo on your phone, let it auto-sync to Immich, and then grab it straight from your computer's file picker — no need to open the Immich web UI, download anything by hand, or fill up your disk. When you actually open or attach a photo, Drive for Immich fetches just that file on demand and hands it to whatever app asked for it (great for attaching a recent photo to a Craigslist listing, an email, or a form).
Drive for Immich uses the same Windows mechanism as OneDrive and Dropbox — the Cloud Files API — to create placeholder files. They look and behave like normal files in Explorer (correct names, dates, and thumbnails) but take up 0 bytes until you open one. Opening a file ("hydrating" it) streams the original down from your Immich server in the background; closing and freeing space dehydrates it back to a placeholder.
- Organized the way you think about it —
2026-06 Junedate folders (newest first), plus Albums, Favorites, and Partners folders that mirror Immich and stay in sync. - Real thumbnails without downloading — a lightweight shell extension fetches Immich's small thumbnails so you can see your photos before opening them, with nothing on disk.
- Lives in the tray — a single tray icon shows status (online / syncing) and lets you open settings, refresh, or pause. No heavyweight background service.
- Quiet when your server isn't there — if Immich can't be reached (it's down, you're off the VPN, the laptop woke up early) the tray icon goes grey with an amber dot and the flyout says so. It keeps retrying on its own and reconnects when the server comes back, or you can hit Try again. No pop-ups, no sounds.
- Install Drive for Immich from the Microsoft Store.
- Open Drive for Immich and enter:
- your Immich server URL (e.g.
https://photos.example.com) - an API key (Immich → Account Settings → API Keys → New API Key).
- your Immich server URL (e.g.
- Click Test connection, then Connect. Your drive appears in Explorer under Drive for Immich (a sync-root entry in the navigation pane, like OneDrive).
That's it — browse by date and double-click (or attach) any photo.
- Windows 11 (build 22621 or newer) — Drive for Immich relies on the Cloud Files API and modern shell thumbnails.
- An Immich server you can reach (any reasonably recent version), and an API key from it.
Building from source, the MSIX packaging pipeline, and how the pieces fit together — the resident app, the thumbnail shell extension, the Cloud Files provider, and the on-disk index — are documented in DEVELOPMENT.md.
Licensed under the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0: free for any personal and other noncommercial use, including modifying and redistributing it. Commercial use is not permitted. Copyright © 2026 Ryan Ewen.