immich-app
Better sharing in Immich
Sharing precious photos and videos is an important part of immich, but right now it is a bit confusing and limiting. There are some technical implications to sharing decisions, especially as it relates to security and access controls. Lately there have been a lot of PRs tweaking queries here and there, but really this deserves a proper face lift by the development team. For now, we are going to put a feature freeze on any sharing related changes while we internally discuss and come up with a plan for what sharing in immich will look like moving forward.
This issue will serve as a placeholder for current limitations and feature requests around various sharing mechanisms
A "better solution" should incorporate following:
- Albums
- Stacks
- Shared links
- Partner sharing
- Library sharing
- Asset data (tags, people, etc.)
- Actions in the web that are "sharing aware", which includes better error messages, more clarity around what actions can be done on what assets, etc.
hey, i have related idea.
My setup: Each family member has his own account and one additional account with created external library. This account is sharing that library thru partner sharing with all family members.
What's is working: Sharing all photos in timeline works fine. What's should be implemented: Add possibility to share all albums using 'partner sharing'.
Right now, to share albums, i have to choose them manually. With 50+ albums, it's quite long and boring process. Adding sharing an albums to 'Partner Sharing' or add some option to share all albums at once (example flow: Select user to share with -> Select albums -> use ctrl+a to select all -> shared) would help this process alot.
Throwing my vote in for this one. I was about to submit a feature request specifically targeting the ability to share facial recognition people with partners. I'd prefer my people-based searching to include results from all shared libraries and partner uploads that I have access to.
It would be great to see the smart search integrated into shared albums, and especially if they are shared via a link, this way even those who don't have an Immich account (a friend from work with whom the album is shared) will be able to use the smart search to find a specific image.
I think there should be a difference between sharing and several people collaborating on the library. It is a great desire from me to have many people maintaining the library, including access to all tags folders, etc
Sharing could be if you wanted to show some pictures (read-only) to someone without creating accounts for them, etc
Wishes:
- The ability to have many people maintain the library
- Nested albums
- Groups of people, and the ability to give access to library / albums with groups. Today, when trying to share 30 albums with someone, it can be very tiresome
- Create albums based on tags
- Search based on tags
- Everyone gets access to tags and folders
I hope these features are being worked on. Basically the only things missing as of now
I agree with the @jeffrpowell. I've recently discovered that facial recognition doesn't work with partner-shared photos and it's very confusing as I can't find mentions of this limitation in the documentation - nor in the "Facial Recognition" or "Partner Sharing" sections.
Think of the situation user A and user B are sharing photos using a shared album. At the moment user A can only tag his own photos in the shared album. It would be a nice feature that user A can tag his own photos and the photos shared by user B.
I come from the world of Synology Photos, where every family member has an account and can also access the shared space which contains photos of family events.
Maybe the spaces approach could be implemented with the partner sharing feature of Immich. Imagine it like an "account" selector, where you can select who's photos you want to see. There you can select your own or any shared account and view it as if it were your own. Depending on the perms given to you by its owner, you could also edit tags or peoples.
Don't really know how to call this, but it has nothing to do with this discussion.
I just started my journey with Immich a day ago, and I'm already very impressed. The accuracy of facial recognition compared to Synology is astounding! There are very few things I miss or have not found yet, on the other hand, there are features I will definitely miss on Synology.
What I want to say is basically how much I appreciate the work which is done here đź’ś Thank you!
I am also coming from Synology Photos, and looking for an alternative. Immich is looking pretty good! It would be nice if there was a way to only share a subset of photos with my partner, for example I don't want to share boring work photos. But I also don't want to use albums, it is annoying to have to define albums for everything :-)
As Hutch79 mentioned, Synology Photos has a concept of a shared space where you can copy photos to. Something like a shared space or a family library would be great in Immich, I think. What I usually do is to move all the common photos to the shared space, and then we organize them together (remove bad ones, select favorites for print etc.). The one downside of the shared space in Synology is that you have to copy files to it, and it actually leaves two copies on the disk. It would be better if you could link Photos into the family library, set them to "shared with the family", "just for the family" or "just for me".
This would be a huge improvement and help a great deal in my situations related to photo storage and management. Just to add to the conversation I have a few scenarios:
- Sharing most of the day to day photos with my household/partner/kids, being able to collaborate on tags, people, places, etc.
- We have a large family we'd like to collaborate with on albums related to family functions. Weddings, holidays, vacations etc. Different groups have different events, so separate access and collaboration controls would fill the need
Groups off the top of my head; Me+Partner, In Laws, My Parents, My multiple siblings families, my partners siblings families, my in laws 8+ siblings families, their adult kids families, extended aunties and uncles and cousins all over the place... Family Reunions are a shindig. Having nest-able groups to make a pyramid of permissions would be fantastic. Having my mother in law be able to sign on and add names to faces would be huge.
- Ive had some family members pass away recently with boxes and boxes of photos we need to scan and digitize. Some are with me, some are with my father, some are with my aunt, etc. Being able to setup a group that everyone can upload photos to, that share metadata including faces, places, tags, etc.
I'd be willing to sponsor or add a bounty for these features if its an option
Hi I just reliazed Partner Sharing can't share recognized People, after some researches and I ended up here and I'd like to drop some comments.
I have a large External Library which takes me more than a week to generate thumbnail for it, and afaik an external library can't be owned by multiple users. So I assigned this library to an account and setup Partner sharing so multiple users can see the photos and videos in this library. However the People section is empty for other users now, I thought this is a bug, but end up this is a Partner Sharing limitation.
Is it possible that:
-
Allow external libraries to be owned by multiple users, and make sure Thumbnails / Metadata / Smart Search only needed to be generated once for the library. I know I can create multiple External Libraries and assign them for each user and pointing to the same mount point, but generating thumbnails really hurt and this will take me MONTHS to finish. Not to mention if there is any file path changes I'll need to generate again.
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Allow recognized People to be shared by Partner Sharing as well.
For your information, I'm still using Synology Photos as my backup app, and Immich imported them as External LIbrary in read-only mode. I hope one day I can ditch the Synology Photos app and make everything works on Immich. Thank you so much for your hard effort on this app!
I've been looking to move to Immoch based on the recommendations of others. The software would be fine for me solo. But, I also maintain libraries of photos from relatives. I'd like to be able to maintain those albums collaboratively.
I would love to see (or help out) with a sharing feature that allows you to share a file to some s3 bucket, so that you can share outside of your local network. Of course during setup there should be a clear notification that this does share your files to some third party service. But it would be of great value to have the option to do that. Or some other mechanism to create links that are reachable for anyone, rather than just people in your network.
Alternatively, if immich was safe enough to host on a public server, that would work too. But as the docs seem to discourage that, another solution would be preferred.
Using s3 would make it very simple and versatile. We could even add timed links. We'd probably want some job to cleanup files that should no longer be shared. You could abstract the thing to support other external targets (sftp, dropbox, image hosting services, etc), but that might be a bit over-engineering it.
Where do the docs discourage that? I know there is still a warning regarding it not being a stable release yet but that is to warn you to make sure you have backups. (Not saying there is no such warning that you mention, I just haven’t seen it) I haven’t seen any security incident thus far either…
I have my immich exposed to the world for quite a while now (since the beginning). Of course the surrounding setup needs to be setup properly and the password shouldn’t be something easy but I wouldn’t say you cannot make your immich public! I share with immich to the other side of the world :D
Where do the docs discourage that?
In the remote access section at the bottom (emphasis mine):
Depending on your configuration, both the Immich web interface and API may be exposed to the internet. Immich is under very active development and the existence of severe security vulnerabilities cannot be ruled out.
I am probably more paranoid than most, but for me this is enough discouragement that I wouldn't expose Immich directly to the outside without a vpn.
+1 for sharing persons and face detection info via partner sharing. I mean a person is always the same, no matter who uploaded the photo. It just feels weird that my wife can see my photos in her timeline but can't see any face information on them nor find them via people search. I guess as long as this feature is missing, credential sharing it is for us.
Wouldn't it be easier to treat face detection and identification globally and not per user? That way all users can profit from one user putting in the time merging persons and everyone should get a higher accuracy.
Besides sharing them, the whole face detection feature feels really nice and just works great. UI/UX is fantastic, it's so easy to merge persons or correct assignments by hand.
Wouldn't it be easier to treat face detection and identification globally and not per user?
No, this would have bad privacy implications on instances with users that don't know eachother.
Wouldn't it be easier to treat face detection and identification globally and not per user?
No, this would have bad privacy implications on instances with users that don't know eachother.
Why would you be sharing with a user you didn't know in the first place?
You wouldn't; the suggestion was to apply the face recognition globally, ie to every user.
Wouldn't it be easier to treat face detection and identification globally and not per user?
No, this would have bad privacy implications on instances with users that don't know eachother.
I meant that more in a technical way under the hood. The behavior right now makes me think persons are tied to one user at a time and my suggestion would be to have a global set of persons and then make them visible to all users based on what photos they are allowed to access. No one should see persons of photos they are not allowed to access ofc.
I meant that more in a technical way under the hood. The behavior right now makes me think persons are tied to one user at a time and my suggestion would be to have a global set of persons and then make them visible to all users based on what photos they are allowed to access. No one should see persons of photos they are not allowed to access ofc.
It will imply creating very complicated permission system, that will require a lot of dev resources. For now it really would be better to have at least local processing (for face recognition, tags etc) for each user for all available assets (partner's included) because it's sounds as an issue or a bug.
But collaborated tags, account groups for albums collaborations, shared spaces, talkings about S3 - it all sounds like a distinct feature requests (not an issues), and it makes this thread way to much to comprehend, especially from devs perspective. I think it would be great to split this thread on different topics and focus on most significant limitations right now. You just can't do everything at once.
We the devs made this consolidated thread deliberately to encompass a large permissions/access rework. If some things are still not covered after that all blows over, separate threads can be made for those at that point.
I would like to have the same features for album sharing. Concretely I’m missing the ability to include shared albums in the timeline and searching for persons in them.
A functionality I'd like to ask for is kind of related to sharing. My immich instance is already exposed to the internet. What I (actually my wife) would like to have is ability to create links to photos of certain resolutions. This would allow me to paste a link to small photo on some forums (like phpbb). Similar what flickr does.
This would be much appreciates. Currently, it also seems not to be possible to use search via location or faces with shared albums. Is this correct?
What I need is:
- User A creates an External Library and scans it
- User A grants read-only access to this External Library to User B
- User B can browse the library and select images to add to his personal Favorites
My use case of my wife and myself (kids are older) appears to be satisfied only by using a single user for both of us. I'm planning a conversion now. Most or all of the issues mentioned above seem to me to come down to separate (per user) meta data. Defining people tends to require a lot of work so sharing that work makes sense but any work like tags, albums, etc. become search vectors that tend toward more value and interest when shared. I recognize there are security and permission issues around all of this.
My son runs his own immich instance. So beyond all of the above I can already easily see tremendous opportunity in 'federation' between immich instances. If i look just at my siblings and other family plus friends who are family there is tremendous OPPORTUNITY to provide experiences, features and function far beyond the existing offers. I don't want to derail this conversation but keeping a wider perspective while getting all of the above right might be very helpful.
A few capabilities I didn't notice above:
- Easy way to flag/tag photos to share where sharing default is not shared (kids, family, friends have lots to share but i'm sure lots to keep private or that are of less interest)
- Example of easy to flag/tag - all pictures containing list of people get shared (if certain family members are in the picture good to share)
- If meta data stays per user a way to share that data as well so that search of any type can span all visible assets (already covered i think but maybe generalized)
- Simple high level read only or read/write permission when defining sharing
I leave off with the thought that just within this discussion there is a vast opportunity to transcend well beyond replacement of existing cloud offers.
+1 for many of these suggestions. I am absolutely loving Immich and not looking back. Having the idea of "view only" users would just take that to the next level.
My use case would be targeted around sharing with users that have permissions controlled granularly. I don't want them to be able to upload photos or delete photos. But I do want them to be able to add tags, see and tag faces, create albums and assign existing photos to said albums. And maybe even be able to "cordon off" an area of photos using paths. So like photos/family are visible to all but photos/personal are visible only to me or who I choose. I get that granular permissions opens a can of worms but it could solve a lot of what's being asked.
Are there any branches or forks where folks have started down the path of building some of the ideas in this thread?
Thanks! Again, love the app. Keep up the great work.
+1 to be able to see the face and people information in a photo with all the people that can see this photo.
Also I do not know if possible but all the pictures that are shared with a user, should appear in the timeline view of that user. I have the following set up. All of my photos are added via external libraries because it is easier for me to organize them and do back ups. And I have parents, wife, other relatives so most of my photos are shared via album because shared profile does not make sense. Old pictures from my father's relatives that my mother's does not really need to see and viceversa. Photos with previous girlfriends that my wife doesn't really need to see and I don't want to delete because they are from trips with friends.
Hope to see changes in this matter soon enough.
Thank you for the amazing work you are doing.
+1 to having the option to share all albums through the partner sharing feature. Based on the comments on this issue I think I am going to back track on having multiple users on my immich instance and instead just have a single user so that I can easily collaborate on the library with my partner without having to do extra configuration.
Big thank you to all the contributors on this product, what an incredible application!
