Face-based photo access for student association – best workflow?
Hi everyone 👋
We’re a student association and we are trying to find the best way to manage photos from our events.
Current setup:
- Photos are uploaded to Google Drive by different photographers
- Then everything is stored long-term on a NAS
Goal / use case:
✅ We want to detect faces
✅ Each student should be able to access only the photos where they appear, without browsing albums of other people
❌ We don’t want to manually create selections or albums per person
Basically, we want something like:
“Show me all the photos where I appear, and let me download them.”
Challenges we are facing with Immich :
- In Immich, only the main library owner can access all photos. Other users can’t see the full library (which prevents them from claiming their face and accessing photos linked to them).
Questions for the community:
- With Immich, is there a recommended approach to let users access only their photos based on face recognition (without granting full library access)?
- Is anyone already doing something like:
- auto-creating albums per identified person
- automatically generating a share link per album
- sending the link to the person?
Or is there a different architecture / workflow more suited to this type of use case?
We’re open to alternative workflows (API automation, Nextcloud integration, scripts, etc.).
Goal is to get a clean, privacy-friendly flow for large events with hundreds of students.
Any advice, best practices, or examples from other users would be super helpful 🙏
Thank you — Immich is awesome!
3 Replies
:wave: Hey @Picsmathias,
Thanks for reaching out to us. Please carefully read this message and follow the recommended actions. This will help us be more effective in our support effort and leave more time for building Immich :immich:.
References
- Container Logs:
docker compose logs docs
- Container Status: docker ps -a docs
- Reverse Proxy: https://immich.app/docs/administration/reverse-proxy
- Code Formatting https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/210298617-Markdown-Text-101-Chat-Formatting-Bold-Italic-Underline#h_01GY0DAKGXDEHE263BCAYEGFJA
Checklist
I have...
1. :ballot_box_with_check: verified I'm on the latest release(note that mobile app releases may take some time).
2. :ballot_box_with_check: read applicable release notes.
3. :ballot_box_with_check: reviewed the FAQs for known issues.
4. :ballot_box_with_check: reviewed Github for known issues.
5. :ballot_box_with_check: tried accessing Immich via local ip (without a custom reverse proxy).
6. :ballot_box_with_check: uploaded the relevant information (see below).
7. :ballot_box_with_check: tried an incognito window, disabled extensions, cleared mobile app cache, logged out and back in, different browsers, etc. as applicable
(an item can be marked as "complete" by reacting with the appropriate number)
Information
In order to be able to effectively help you, we need you to provide clear information to show what the problem is. The exact details needed vary per case, but here is a list of things to consider:
- Your docker-compose.yml and .env files.
- Logs from all the containers and their status (see above).
- All the troubleshooting steps you've tried so far.
- Any recent changes you've made to Immich or your system.
- Details about your system (both software/OS and hardware).
- Details about your storage (filesystems, type of disks, output of commands like fdisk -l and df -h).
- The version of the Immich server, mobile app, and other relevant pieces.
- Any other information that you think might be relevant.
Please paste files and logs with proper code formatting, and especially avoid blurry screenshots.
Without the right information we can't work out what the problem is. Help us help you ;)
If this ticket can be closed you can use the /close command, and re-open it later if needed.
Successfully submitted, a tag has been added to inform contributors. :white_check_mark:I don't think Immich is the tool you are looking for.
it could be done, with a lot of work building a side app to do all that advanced logic messing with the API and DB, but that's up to you to solve.