Library sharing and people matching

[andymarden]

My setup is this: I have a "family" user which owns an external library which is where all of our family's historical photos are.
This is then shared with each family member as a user.
It's great that now th9is can show up on maps but my question is on people face matching. Unless I am missing something, each user gets to identify people in their own libraries so, in this case, the "family" user can go through and do that.
However, it seems this matching is not available to the users that the library is shared with. Of course, I would want all family members to be able to see this.

SO making that available would be good - even better would be if you could say "this person in the shared library is the same as this person in my own library" and link the people

Have I missed something or is this a new/existing enhancement request?

I could have every user create their own external library on the same folder but that is a HUGE increase in resources required and it means everyone doing all this stuff for themselves.

This must generally be a very common way to want to use Immich and I hope that this is a lens that is being considered as work progresses - each user really would want to see their own + the shared libraries in one view.

[andymarden]

I can see that looking further, the shared libraries are very separate in the users display which is a real shame

Maybe I need to rethink this at this stage and have everyone log on as the same user since the primary purpose is around sharing family photos - the ability to upload and store your own photos is 2nd to this.

But, as I said - it would be great if we could move to a more integrated experience.

[mikesellt]

I'm just going to add my thoughts here as well. I'm moving from Synology to TrueNAS, and as a result am moving my photo library over to Immich. I have a lot of photos already, and I'd like to be able to add them as an external library, but give all of my users (my wife and kids) view access to that external library while still keeping their own individual libraries for cell phone backup. I don't see a way to do this currently without making individual external libraries for each user and adding the same photo folder in each of them - basically duplicating the external library for each user. If that library were duplicated, I don't think all of the face recognition would persist between each library. If we could just have one external library and have it shared between users, they could help match the faces and whatnot.

Also, great project so far. I'm really liking Immich in general. Thanks.

[tuupola]

Yep, this is how it should work.

[mikesellt]

Hello tuupola, I'm not sure what you mean by your reply. Should facial recognition persist across shared libraries? Or do you mean that I need to create an external library for each user that point to the same master folder?

[andymarden]

I hope the former in that all users (or a singer with permissions) can not only view all things related to the library but also can contribute to reviewing and updating facial recognition, etc, such then everyone can see the same thing.

[rytl4847]

I also hope that this gets implemented in the future. I have the exact same use case as @andymarden.

The option to include shared library resources in the map view was added last year after a similar request.

[optoisolated]

It should be possible as in when you share a library with a partner you can share the location information, you should also be able to share the people as well. Even if its a selectable option.

Our library is set up in a similar way with two individual users but we would like to see each others libraries and having to people-match on each library separately is laborious.

[andymarden]

Ultimately this is about the underlying data model. At the moment, library is something owned by user and tied to it.

It would be better to think of them as separate entities/classes with a nanny to many relationship between them.

The link entity between them drives the users and the access they have to the libraries eg. view photos, view locations, view face recognition, etc and then edit for each of these things on a per library basis.

There has already been a recognition of this with external libraries moving out from user ownership, but take it to its logical conclusion send all the flexibility required with be there.

There's a load of work to do that but it would be worth it in the long run.

[Jacup]

library could be owned by 1 person to manage that, but maybe add additional field with collection of users eligible to view contents? Maybe even a little permissions management with roles like viewer, view+modify etc.

[Jacup]

As an WA, what about creating user, that will own an external library and share it to the other family members?
This could help to not share all private photos between users, just the common (external) one, but does not resolves people match.

[PrayerfulDrop]

The lack of sharing my 120k+ assets with my family users automatically has caused me to halt using Immich. There is no easy way to create albums based on the assets and lack of global select all capabilities. I do not use folder structures in the external library since 2015 so the CLI tool is useless. All of my assets from iCloud into years/months/days folder structure. Without the option to expose the entire external library to all IMMICH users or the ability to create albums from the AI and face recognition groupings.

[andymarden]

I have outlined this before - it's clearly a big deal to me and others. It is a data modelling thing:

• a user exists
• a library exists (this may be external or internal)
• a library has one user as the owner
• each library has a number of actions that can be performed on it - add, delete, modify photos, link facial recognition, view map info, view facial recognition etc (this will expend over time), view action permissions, modify action permissions, transfer ownership
• any user can have permissions on each action on each library the owner always has permissions for all actions on a library they own

Unless you think if this in the terms of this (simplified) data model, everything will always be a compromise.

At the moment, the inherent data model (explicit or implicit) is not like this and matching the common use cases suffers as a result). You can patch around the edges, but it will get harder and harder to maintain.

Happy to help as I have about a million years experience doing this sort of stuff and the scars to show.

[eddified]

My setup is this: I have a "family" user which owns an external library which is where all of our family's historical photos are. This is then shared with each family member as a user.

I cannot find a way to share the external library. @andymarden can you please explain how you did that?

[kgerg2]

Not OP, but I have a similar setup. There is a user for the sole purpose of being the owner of an external library, and it shares all its photos using the partner sharing feature, essentially sharing the external library. This seems to me the easiest way to do it.

[hs-ye]

this should really go to the top as the current best workaround solution, it basically achieves what most of the use cases I imagine people are using Immich for in terms of sharing privately within families.

[davidancell]

I use the same setup as @kgerg2 however, the people matching feature isn't available. It's very unfortunate. I'd LOVE for this to be implemented.