[Feature]: Add federation to share albums with users from other immich servers

[anbraten]

Feature detail

As a user I would like to share images. In addition to sharing with users of my instance, public users via link (see #265), I would like to be able to share with a user from another immich instance.

What's the benefit over "simply" sharing with a link?

• The other user could be allowed to edit the album
• By sharing with an explicit user from an other instance this user would be able to sync the shared photos to his instance as well

Platform

Server

[bo0tzz]

Thanks for the suggestion! Federation between instances is not something that we currently consider in scope for Immich. As for the specific features you mention, editing shared albums as an external user is something that is already planned in that feature. Syncing photos from a shared album is you could accomplish with a fairly small external script using the Immich API.

[domacikolaci]

Any chance this could reenter the roadmap?

With FUTO funding and the project coming such a long way, it would be amazing to see this on the roadmap even as a "down the line" consideration.

I would love to have the ability to "connect" my server with my mates server so we can share albums and data between each other and allow our users to share data between each other. For anyone from a corporate Microsoft background, this B2B integrations with SharePoint and Teams as an example.

[axgdcode]

I am 100% on board with saying that it's missing from the current roadmap. Google's shared album features are super attractive to users. A similar feature in Immich is more complex because we are in a multi-instance system. One of the Immich members talks about it in this conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_2oydlnpCQ, so I remain hopeful. It's the feature I also miss to use Immich on a daily basis.

[MrModest]

Just willing to share my vision of the implementation of this feature, if the team ever will have time for this :D

#13620

[bo0tzz]

Reopened as @zackpollard has expressed a desire to work on this at some point.

[looowizz]

Might be interesting to try to implement this using the Open Cloud Mesh Protocol for compatibility with Nextcloud and OwnCloud?

[MrModest]

How do you see Immich communicating with a File Cloud app? 🤔

[looowizz]

Nextcloud currently has a similar photos backup solution called Memories. This just uses a photos folder, then folders for albums within that.

I'd imagine Immich could work in a similar way, sharing an album Could work function as sharing a folder. Might be a bit more complicated to implement as lots of the metadata for images are stored in Immich's database and sidecar files (which arent yet supported by Memories) but I think it'd be quite cool!
EDIT: Oops, seems like Memories doesn't just use folders for albums. I think, still, using this protocol would be good for the future, as it is probably one of the most well suited and widely used, standardised protocol for this.

[MrModest]

Immich (unlike Google) follows the approach "do not touch the original files", so as long as album share will cause sending a copy of original photos to the NC, all metadata should remain in the files directly.
Immich stores metadata in the DB just for performance reasons, it doesn't remove them from files themselves.

[MrModest]

btw, checked their demo: https://demo.memories.gallery/apps/memories/

Not as bad, as I'd expected from a Nextcloud app :D all basic features are there and it even has an "Explore" feature like search and Face recognition. Immich is still a way better, in my opinion, thought 😁