I installed immich-distribution via snap (based on Immich, the self-hosted photo gallery) on my desktop running Ubuntu 22.04.4. I eventually determined that this was running on port 3001. I got VNC working again on my desktop, and in a browser, navigated to http://localhost:3001 . I then struggled to configure an External Library to use the existing files on my desktop. Eventually I had success by setting up a bind-mount:
sudo snap stop immich-distribution
cd /var/snap/immich-distribution/common
sudo mkdir my-local-directory-name
sudo mount --bind /path/to/pictures ./my-local-directory-name
sudo snap start immich-distribution
cd /var/snap/immich-distribution/common
sudo mkdir my-local-directory-name
sudo mount --bind /path/to/pictures ./my-local-directory-name
sudo snap start immich-distribution
Then within Immich, I went to Administration, External Libraries. For my previously configured library (which previously wasn't able to find any photos), I clicked the three dots, Edit Import Paths, and used:
/var/snap/immich-distribution/common/my-local-directory-name
