Prevent duplicate thumbnails and face recognition of the same image(s) for multiple users
Hello everyone,
first of all, great job on the current state of Immich. It already looks great.
While I have setup a private nextcloud for my family, including for photo sharing, I was looking into alternatives, for a nicer UI, better face recognition features etc and stumbled upon Immich which ticks a lot of boxes.
One thing that I could not figure out (which is also a problem on Nextcloud or other alternatives I have tried so far), is how I can share images between mutliple users with all features such as exploration/maps/people/face recognition, without having to generate (and store!) the thumbnails and face clusters (including their names) for each user.
I understand that most solutions (e.g. nextcloud) is primarily a server where users can store and manage their individual files/images. However, in a family setup, I image there being quite a lot of use-cases where one would like to have images shared across multiple users (ideally with different edit permissions). While I have seen that I can share with partners in Immich, the partner will "only" (already great for the current state of things) see the shared images in a timeline. As far as I can tell, the partner cannot "explore" the shared images e.g. by looking for faces (please correct me if I am wrong here).
Likewise the partner would not be able to help with naming faces to properly label people.
Another thing I tried, was to use an external library (as I currently have my images stored in nextcloud anyways), which I then include for all users. While this works in that everyone now has all features, Immich appears to treat the identical images as individual assets for each user and creates thumbnails and performs face recognition for each image for each user again, resulting in quite a lot of additional disk requirements as well as processing time.
Is there a way to prevent this overhead, or is this a feature that is planned for the future?
Thanks again for any help and the great application!
2 Replies
This isn't possible yet, but we do want to look into better family sharing options in the future
Thanks for the extremely quick reply. Good to know that I did not overlook something in the documentation. I'll keep my eye on the development then, as this would be a key feature I would like (form any image application tbh and afaik none of them really supports this use case yet for some reason).
As I mentioned, I would already be fairly "happy" with a workaround of the external library being processed only once if multiple users include the same one, if that were to make development easier. But since I have not yet checked the code, I am not sure, if Immich can currently even recognize if included images are identical, or how difficult it would be to handle conflicts (e.g. one person naming a face X but another person naming the same face Y etc).