[Feature]: Rule-based smart albums

[srlamin19]

Feature detail

Would be great if Immich can suggest a smart view/creation in albums based on Dates (days, month, year), Locations (Cities, Countries) in this way of smart views..

Platform

Web

[alextran1502]

Can you elaborate on the feature? It would be nice if you also had some examples.

[Gitonthegrid]

can I also give some information on this?

I now use primarily Synology Photos because of this feature. It is extremely handy to create albums this way.
To give a example, Every year I want to make a book from the whole family, so I can create a "smart album" that is called Family pictures 2023 where it looks for:

• Photos that has me as face recognition
• Photos that has my wife as face recognition
• Photos that has my kids as face recognition
• Photos that are made in

If a photo has all these boxes checked. It will put it in that created folder.

Synology Photos also works with tags (I miss that feature to in immich), so if I want to have a smart album with specific tags like Christmas, I can create a smart album that puts all photo`s with the tag Christmas in it.

These are just very simple examples, but smart albums are one of the best features I am working with the past 1.5 years

[palitu]

i think it is something like, immich notices that you are typically in place x, then notices that you went to place y, it then says here is a "smart album" which is autmatically generated for your trip to y on date.

[puregreen59]

Thought of a great but simiple way of auto creating albums prehaps with a (Needs moderation) label.

Put a page in user settings or admin where you can add dates for birthdays of you and significant others. Even have options for anniversarys and such

You could use this information to auto create simple albums of the day like ' my son, name here 6th birthday (Moderation required)'

It's just I often find auto creation based on content never gets it right, so having it this way could be helpful, and a lot less resource intensive

Not saying instead of the normal auto albums,just as either a option to use that or this, or as a extra.

[Andrew-71]

I think it would be a good idea to have a smart album that included photos from a specific source, for example the phone camera.

A use case I can think of and would personally use that for is:
I take a lot of photos on my phone, and generally use it as my main camera. However I also save a ton of meme images. Therefore my gallery is a mess, and whenever I need to find an image from either of these categories I have to go through over 5000 files, with over half of those being completely unrelated.

In a nutshell, what I'm suggesting is to have an album that sorts photos based on device. For example, if I select "iPhone 12" only show pics shot on an iPhone 12.

[jrasm91]

I wonder if you actually need any album features for this, or if it really just searching and filtering. I can imagine a situation where you just search by selecting device:phone and you see that subset.

[Gitonthegrid]

With Synology photos the search option also includes albums, so it is extremely handy, because you dont have "advanced search" every time. If I want to show all photos with just our family on it. I can search family, and the albums pop up and I can see al the pictures with me, my wife and my child on it.

So is you do often searches with 2+ advanced search options, it is very handy to have smart albums
I do know a some other people with Synology NAS and they all use this feature.

[RegalMonkey]

I think what I'd be looking for here is the ability to create an album based on a given context. Example, I can sort based on a person, allow the creation of an album to have all photos of that person in a sharable album/link. Adding to the album once a new picture is given a relevant tag in the future could be updated as a job function. Similar behavior for any other identifying metric for the picture, date, location, camera, or even manual tags that could be added.

[AngelaDMerkel]

This is a more powerful solution and can go a long way to automating some kinds of sharing. Having conditions like:

Person 1 or Person 2 and between December 19 and December 25 would allow a Christmas album to be created which only contains family and which contains all Christmas holidays between a range of dates

[sorinciupitu]

UP

[sembeek]

I really miss this feature from Synology Photos, it would be nice if this is implemented in Immich.
I used it to share an album containing photos with the faces of my family members automatically, so they can access this shared album always containing their photos only.

[dodert]

I just add environment to mine :D

[shummo]

@keesfluitman
Can you tell my please, how can I use this script? What and where i have to replace in script?

Is it ok if I create a .env file next to the .py script with theese:

SERVER_URL="https://1..........................02"
BASE_URL="https://1.............................02"
API_KEY="1C....................................................LsE"
PERSON_ID="51...................................a6"
ALBUM_ID="..........................................b"
MODE="update"
BUCKET_SIZE="MONTH"

Thanks

[keesfluitman]

Lemme improve it a bit. What system do you run immich on?

[shummo]

Thanks. I run immich in Docker (on Debain 12).

OFF:
And i have a question to you, beacuse it is really close to this script!

I would like to choose the best pics from my children/family. And they should go to an shared album.

Tagging pics, and replace them to an album is not possible yet. But MY SOLUTION would be to mark pics as favourite, than all in favourite would go to album. With the app, me and my wife can easily add the photos to favourites.

Maybe is it possible also to add photos from favourite to an UI specified shared album, and than REMOVE theese from favourites with script?
Unfortunatelly, I can't programing, but i think the flow would be:
1.get all assets with the favorite parameter>>> https://immich.app/docs/api/get-all-assets
2. get their IDs from that call
3. add ID to the album >>> https://immich.app/docs/api/add-assets-to-album
4. then update asset command to remove the favorite status >>> https://immich.app/docs/api/update-asset

[keesfluitman]

Ye you are right, i could use those endpoints.

I hope i have time this week.
A script like this, you place somewhere, and then add a cron job on debian.
You know how to do that?
Otherwise add me as friend on discord and we can chat there...ill also ask if this type of auto album features are worked on.

Inform yourself a bit about running pythonscripts and crom jobs though, that's sth you should be able to do.
'To execute a Python script, first open a terminal, then navigate to the directory where the script is located, and finally, run the script using the 'python' command followed by the script's name. On Linux, consider using python3 to ensure you're using Python 3.'

[Zakmaf]

Hi everybody!
This is the first time I ever post a suggestion for an open-source project. This is how in love i'm with this project, and very grateful for all the hard work from contributors.

Coming from a service that shall remain nameless (but it's Google Photos, really), I would love to have the option to "share a face". Use faces as if they are their own albums, just albums that automatically populate.

I use to share this way on Google Photos with trusted friends. (I know it's risky because in case of "misrecognition" you could potentially share something you should'nt with someone else.)

[Kaaybi]

I also use Synology Photos and smart albums is really a cool feature.
You can create an album based on conditions like:

• source library
• specific folder path
• media type (photo and/or video)
• creation date (before or after specific date or in a range)
• tags
• ratings
• locations

This is specifically convenient to automatically share a constantly growing album for example like many said an album of a child shared to grandparents where pictures of your child gets automatically added with conditions like face recognition.

For Immich, in my opinion one of the simpliest way to achieve this would be to use the search feature and having a "smart album" act as a shortcut to a search request. One could create a smart album by making a search then pressing a button "save as a smart album".

One other but harder possibility is to mimic what Synology Photos did which means a modal to create and edit smart albums (sorry the interface is in french):

Smart album creation button in Synology Photos:

Smart album creation modal in Synology Photos specifying a source library, dates and a tag "Partage":

Smart album modification in Synology Photos:

[benmccann]

Here's what the dialog looks like in English for reference:

[projek01]

Hello everyone, thank you for all of the contributions to make IMMICH such a great piece of open source software. This is the last feature that would allow me to pull the plug on Google Photos. I hope we can see something like this in a future release of IMMICH soon!

[docwisdom]

I would really like to create albums based on the folder location from my external library. So /import/Work would automatically go into a Work album.

[gbcatrinoiu]

Person-based folders would be amazing! Thanks for such amazing work!

[Vergil365]

would be nice to make a smart album for photos that are in no albums :)

[frejaya]

For dates - I would like it to be able to run the logic on just month day as well, excluding year. This would allow me to create an album that automatically adds each family member's photos to an album for their birthdays throughout the years. E.g. all photos taken any year on Month x day x will automatically be added to album "Person's birthdays".

[mattkmwu]

Would definitely love to have this feature as this was the one of the cool feature in Google Photos. An album that is auto-updating that uses facial recognition. This way, my kids' album is always updated without me manually sorting it.

[benmccann]

A big question about smart albums is which of these two options would people prefer:

• A readonly album which is automatically updated when photos are uploaded or updated. E.g. if you add a facial recognition tag the image is added to the album or if you remove a person from being tagged in the photo then that photo is removed
• An album where photos are added to it only when the album is created and new photos are uploaded, but not when an image is updated and photos are never removed (e.g. it would not be updated when updating the facial recognition tags per the previous example). However, you can also add additional photos that you select to the album.

[Batwam]

For me it's definitely the first one. If I fix names in facial recognition after the album has been created, I would expect the album content to update accordingly.

[stephenpapierski]

I don't think it's either. How is the first one different from just going to Explore -> People and selecting a person? That is an always up to date "album" of a given person.

What I want is the option to select people to always add to an album that is not read-only. For example, I have an album for kid1. I would like all photos that recognize their face to show up in that album (even after photos updates), BUT I also want to be able to manually add photos to that album as well where their face wasn't recognized (back to the camera, in a helmet, etc).

[benmccann]

@stephenpapierski option 1 is basically equivalent to running a saved search, but could be optimized to be faster. If you're just selecting a person, it would be equivalent to selecting just that person, but you could also combine it with other facets such as a time frame, etc. If there was someone not tagged in a photo and you wanted to them to appear in an album you would simply add the missing tag

For option 2, you could add the person to the album without adding the tag. But if someone were mistagged and you removed the tag, it would not remove them from the album. Likewise, if you added the missing tag, it would not automatically add them to the album.

[dontflipmybits]

I hope your factor in how people would and want to use the face tagging ability as currently, G Photos lets you create an album based on faces you want auto-added to it. Then I can share the folder with my spouse, she also has the ability to add faces she chooses (could be different than my rules) to auto-add to the same album. Plus we both can add photos ad-hoc to it whenever.

[dontflipmybits]

It would be smart to add typical checks such that, upon creation, you can add photos that match these rules going forward or allow you to include everything in the library.
It should also evaluate when to add photos to the album as a post-check after a photo has gone through the face tagging process, it would be kludgy if this was simply cron'd.

[RegalMonkey]

I'm inclined to have it as simple as 'album is any photos containing tag(s) X,Y, and/or Z' that update on some scheduled basis to fit the parameters. This could include not only facial recognition but any arbitrary tag you applied to a photo. I'm some ad-hoc sense this already happens by virtue of the analytics engine. If I search 'bird' the app will present me with a collection of pictures that it at least thinks are a bird. By allowing manual tags and saving of outputs for a search as an album that handles the creation, maintenance could be a scheduled task to find new add/deletes and update accordingly.

…

On April 4, 2024 7:07:52 PM CDT, Ben McCann ***@***.***> wrote: A big question about smart albums is which of these two options would people prefer: - A readonly album which is automatically updated when photos are uploaded or updated. E.g. if you add a facial recognition tag the image is added to the album or if you remove a person from being tagged in the photo then that photo is removed - An album where photos are added to it only when the album is created and new photos are uploaded, but not when an image is updated and photos are never removed (e.g. it would not be updated when updating the facial recognition tags per the previous example). However, you can also add additional photos that you select to the album. -- Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: #1673 (comment) You are receiving this because you commented. Message ID: ***@***.***>

[m3brown]

There is a similar feature request (#8331) that addresses saved searches. Commenting here to acknowledge the similarity.

[keesfluitman]

@sembeek hey i made this script that does this

https://pastebin.com/Vi5hA10r

you just need to fill in: server_url = (https://localhost:port) email = (immich login) password = (immich pass) person_id= (https://localhost:port/people/**this number***) album_id = (https://localhost:port/albums/**this number***)

and set it to run every x amount of time using either windows task manager or crontab

Nice work. Definitely will use that for now. Even if it could be nicely implemented as well! I assume you use this documentation
https://immich.app/docs/api/

Im getting this on your script
Failed to fetch time buckets. Status code: 400, Response text: {"message":["id must be a UUID"],"error":"Bad Request","statusCode":400}

The api endpoint was deprecated. See above for an adapted script.