Generally, accessing files both as a share and through an app is not well supported. If Immich doesn’t support setting ownership, you might be able to patch it to add the feature.

Otherwise, I’d probably stick to the user-group model you have currently, and do the chown/chmod. Immich should be able to fully manage files as long as it has the group permissions necessary (g+rw).

They got a new owner years ago. No one should still be using it. Lawnchair has been great for me.

Sonarr does exactly what you’re describing. It wouldn’t be overkill to set it up just for that and qbittorrent. The full stack would probably be overkill.

Fun fact, even reads wear out solid state media! https://superuser.com/questions/722917/will-mounting-a-file-system-read-only-increase-the-lifespan-of-an-ssd/725145#725145

But it would take decades of constant reads to wear it out. SD cards are less durable than ssds, but even there you probably wouldn’t be able to achieve it with reads exclusively.