Better sharing in Immich (feature freeze)

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

@jeffrpowell

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.

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 💜
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.
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

Some days ago I decided to try immich. I used the NAS systems of Synology and QNAP before and they did not satisfy me.
First I tried to install a VM on proxmox. It did not succeed. No I am running in a container on proxmox and it runs fine. Importing pictures works like a charm. Tagging with locations and recognizing faces works great!
BUT !!!!
All this features are limited to the one who imports the pictures. No one else in the family does have a benefit of the premium features of immich. They can only see "stupid" sets of pictures. There is a years old discussion about this, but nothing happens. I do not undestand the concept of this app. Is it intended only for one person? So, - why is there a user management?
Sorry, - but somehow I have the assumption, that immich is only made for a singel user. Is this right? Does it make sense to wait?

There is a years old discussion about this, but nothing happens.

https://docs.immich.app/overview/support-the-project/

Also, scroll a few posts up to find an answer to your question.

Think I will try Noodle Gallery.

Think I will try Noodle Gallery.

Immich serves as a strong foundation as an open-source project. However, it is Noodle that truly makes it usable in a multi-user environment - one where multiple members, such as those within a family, can genuinely share photos.

I have to say, the repeated promotion of Noodle Gallery / OpenNoodle in this issue is becoming very hard to take in good faith.

This thread is about Immich’s implementation of people sharing / partner sharing. The current development status has already been addressed just a few comments above, including links to the April recap and the related work currently going through testing. Ignoring that context and immediately redirecting the conversation to “I’ll try Noodle Gallery” does not add anything useful to the discussion.

To be clear: users comparing alternatives is one thing. But repeatedly steering an Immich issue thread toward a competing fork/product, especially after the topic has already been discussed at length, comes across less like constructive feedback and more like promotion. Whether intended or not, it is disruptive for everyone subscribed to this issue and unfair to the maintainers who are actively working on the feature.

Please stop using this issue tracker as an advertising channel. If people want to discuss or promote Noodle Gallery, there are more appropriate places for that. This thread should stay focused on Immich: the current implementation, remaining gaps, testing feedback, and constructive discussion around the feature.

@alextran1502

Is this some sad attempt at astroturfing? @alextran1502 can you block those?

It certainly doesn't seem like a conspiracy to promote. Makes more sense to me that some people are frustrated that such a great piece of software, Immich, has had such severe limitations in this usage space for so long. Declaring "I'm leaving for x" in frustration is unhelpful and unpleasant, but I get it where it's coming from.
🤷‍♂️

I'm patiently waiting, but the other projects "rebase and reversible extension" promise is pretty neat. I hope it's experimentation brings benefits here :)

Just lock the thread, it's anyway full of people lacking the attention span to read few posts and people shilling for some vibe coded garbage, so nothing of value will be lost. There hasn't been an original thought for a while now (this post included).

Thank you for the responses and suggestions, everyone. As requested, and to avoid adding more noise to unnecessary notifications for people who subscribed to this thread, I will lock it for the time being. I will keep making updates, though. A short update this time.

We are putting the work into the features in #27437; it will probably make it into v3.1 or v3.2. Some of the big changes

Rework the data model to allow implementing sharing features more easily
The hardest part: face information will be shared between users in the most natural way.
When an album is shared with you, you will be able to allow the assets in the album to show in your timeline, like your own album.

Also, in case you miss this month's recap, please find the blog post here https://immich.app/blog/2026-may-recap

Lastly, for those who are advertising other projects. Please at least respect the original creator and stop advertising or shilling other projects. Thank you

Hey everyone! The latest release candidate https://github.com/immich-app/immich/releases/tag/v3.3.0-rc.1 finally features proper person sharing (building on top of the previously released cluster groups). Please give it a spin and see if you like it! We also wrote a bit about it in our latest blog post https://immich.app/blog/2026-september-recap#person-sharing

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Better sharing in Immich (feature freeze) #12614

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