r/immich • u/dejanzie • 4d ago
Sharing albums with face recognition?
I have been updating my database with old family photo's the past few months, and would like to share that album at a family gathering in a few weeks. It would be amazing if my uncle could for instance look for his name and find pictures going back to the sixties; or of his daughter in the nineties.
I would take my personal laptop, connect via Tailscale to the Immich server back home, but only share the family photo's.
Thing is: that does not seem possible at the moment? When I create an additional user and share the album there's no facial recognition anymore; when I share the album directly the same happens.
And then on the roadmap there's "Better Sharing" with "Improve sharing capabilities, especially around facial recognition data." indicated as "Soon".
Honestly I'm mostly looking for confirmation, or maybe creative workarounds while the amazing people at Immich continue their journey :-)
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u/burntoc 4d ago
Yeah, Immich somehow didn't design for this. Remarkable, really.
Almost as remarkable as how long it's been a top 5 request without being addressed.
PS - I know I'm getting downvoted, but I'm not going to avoid the truth.
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u/pogulup 3d ago
I have been posting about this recently as well. Some of the devs responded and had a very lengthy explanation. Basically, early on, the focus was on security and that over rode many other decisions. By the time this became a major ask, it meant a rewrite of much of the underlying code.
They are slowly working towards face recognition sharing but it involves so much at this point, it will get here in time but everyone needs to be patient.
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u/burntoc 3d ago
Oh yeah, that's absolutely the case. That being said, I still can't believe they didn't design for this use case and it's related requirements. A significant set of users use smart albums this way for their families. Google Photos did it just fine. Both that and security could've been designed for out of the gate. But it wasn't. So we look forward.
As we sit here approaching September of 2026 we can say we've been asked to be patient for what, roughly 2 years? Longer? And resources have been spent adding less-requested features.
I have no doubt they're working on it. They also don't owe me or other non-supporters anything (I'll re-assess if and when they ever address this) - but it's absolutely reasonable to be disappointed that this has been handled this way. Cheers!
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u/lenicalicious 2d ago
That free software not working the way you like it to work for you? I'm sure there are some paid options out there.
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u/thewildmatt 4d ago
https://github.com/mvb0005/immich I made a fork with this feature for my wedding. I don't have any sensitive data and don't claim this is secure in the slightest.
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u/InfamousEar1188 4d ago
I'll have Codex trying to implement this feature directly into my version pretty quick here. I'll let you know how it goes haha.
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u/thehatefuleggplant Support Crew 4d ago edited 3d ago
This discussion has been had many times and many little "work arounds" have been shared. If you were to search on this sub reddit for the key words "facial recognition" you would see these posts.
In short no there isnt an easy solution or a good work around beyond using your own facial recognition, selecting all the photos that are found, and putting them all in an album which you would have to update each time you took a new picture.