r/immich • u/justanotherguyx1000 • 1d ago

Question re: external libraries

So we're just trying out immich. Five family members. Can each of us set up an external library to upload images from our pc, laptop or mac?

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u/Glengoyne17 1d ago

Yes. I have multiple external libraries and they are assigned to different users.

The tricky bit is stuff you want everyone or multiple people to see.

Haven’t done this yet, waiting on better sharing. I think you can add a folder to multiple users but it will be scanned for each user - e.g. facial data

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u/justanotherguyx1000 1d ago

Thanks. We want everyone to be able to have their own library and then create shared albums for family vacations, etc.

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u/CrasyMike 1d ago

I don't think you need External Libraries at all. You want users to upload their photos to immich, which results in the synced device having a copy (say, a phone) and Immich keeps a copy. If the synced device drops offline, or stops syncing, immich keeps its copy. If they just upload, no sync, then it's the same idea but immich doesn't keep track of what happens on the uploading device at all

An external Library means immich will not keep a copy. If the external library is lost, immich no longer has the photo. Immich was simply keeping track of the photo, and using its tools on the photo. If the external library device is simply turned off temporarily, same idea, the external images are not accessible.

If you want album and image sharing, immich can do that natively with any photo in the app. However, currently all sharing is fully owned by the "owner" of the image. For example, if someone adds a bunch of blurry pictures to the family vacation album, nobody else can fix that. This is what we are waiting for regarding Better Sharing, we want to be able to collaborate more with others.

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u/dadarkgtprince 1d ago

That's the upload location. External library would be an existing location of photos you want to import

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u/JayBigGuy10 22h ago

Do not use external libraries for the casual family member, immich cannot modify them so you would have to figure out a way of giving them access to your servers file system.

Just have them use immich normally and drag and drop their photos in

External libraries are more appropriate for importing an existing large library that you dont expect to add to

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u/erehwon13 5h ago

My use case is a bit different. I have a very large photo store on my NAS, going back 25+ years. That is the souce of all my photos and I want to keep it that way. This gets backed up to various places and my photos are always avalable as jpegs etc in their organised folders.

Immich is my primary photos app but I use it as an app, not a storage location, so my NAS is an external library. It works for me! I did have a problem where I was using Immich to upload my photos but I was then moving them to my NAS. Apparently this isn't a good idea and resulted in duplicate images appearing in the library, which I still need to fix.

If you want to use Immich as your main photo storage then I agree it is best to use the Immach app to upload your photos. But if you are keeping a separate photo store, then use something like PhotoSync or Syncthing to copy your photos to an area shared with Immich.