Mixed (public/private) albums

[Gaibhne]

I can't be the only one who has lots of albums that are, conceptually, a mix between public and private - vacation photos, where the pictures of nature and buildings should be public, but those of my girlfriend should be private. A second "Vacation XY Private" album with nothing but three images of my girlfriend doesn't really seem sensible, nor does duplicating the public images.

What I really would like to do, but the interface won't let me: make an album public, and then select the few personal images in it and manually switch them to private, so they will only be shown to people the album was shared with.

Can we please get such a functionality ?

[kamil4]

Yeah, I understand your use case perfectly.

Unfortunately, it's not just a matter of enabling a button in the GUI; the assumption that all the content of a public album is public is deeply ingrained into our current server code.

As of right now, you've got two options:

1. Duplicate the public images. It's a bit cumbersome, but it's actually OK storage-wise as Lychee will duplicate only the metadata and not the image files themselves.
2. If you want to avoid duplicating, there is another way, but it's actually more cumbersome. Keep the album private and make the photos public one-by-one (using the "eye" button in photo view). Then, to make them visible in public mode, add a tag (say, "vacation_public") to those photos and create a public tag album with that tag. You will need to switch public_photos_hidden config variable to 0 to make these individually public photos visible in tag albums in public mode.

I recognize that neither of these options may seem particularly compelling but, for now at least, that's all we have.

[Gaibhne]

Path #2 sounds like it would be a path towards official support eventually - a UI function to automatically tag all images and create the public tag album, maybe.

[kamil4]

Maybe. There are some differences of opinion among us developers regarding the long-term viability of tag albums. But either way, I agree that the current permissions model is not very compelling so I expect some improvements in the future...

[nagmat84]

There are some differences of opinion among us developers regarding the long-term viability of tag albums.

Regarding that, I have started an independent issue #1141