Immich Traditional Chinese Geodata, Part 2: The Data Pipeline

rchildlin@gmail.com (RxChi1d) — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 10:00:00 +0800

The previous post in this series, How Reverse Geocoding Works, took apart the way Immich reads geographic data: a handful of plain text files get imported into PostgreSQL at startup, and a nearest-neighbour query resolves a place name when a photo is uploaded. Since swapping the files is enough to swap what gets displayed, the remaining question is about those “better files” themselves.

This post takes apart the immich-geodata-zh-tw pipeline, from each country’s official map data all the way to the release.tar.gz that users download.

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Immich Traditional Chinese Geodata, Part 2: The Data Pipeline