Selfhosted

I believe this is what some compression algorithms do if you were to compress the similar photos into a single archive. It sounds like that's what you want (e.g. archive each day), for immich to cache the thumbnails, and only decompress them if you view the full resolution. Maybe test some algorithms like zstd against a group of similar photos vs individually?

FYI file system deduplication works based on file content hash. Only exact 1:1 binary content duplicates share the same hash.

Also, modern image and video encoding algorithms are already the most heavily optimized that computer scientists can currently achieve with consumer hardware, which is why compressing a jpg or mp4 offers negligible savings, and sometimes even increases the file size.

I don't think there's anything commercially available that can do it.

However, as an experiment, you could:

• Get a group of photos from a burst shot
• Encode them as individual frames using a modern video codec using, eg VLC.
• See what kind of file size you get with the resulting video output.
• See what artifacts are introduced when you play with encoder settings.

You could probably/eventually script this kind of operation if you have software that can automatically identify and group images.