Pretty much however you want. You can let it import and sort by a folder logic of your design or can make it read an already existing library without immich modifying the structure.
Can you view an external library using your own folder structure and not in a timeline display? I was under the impression Immich can’t do that, at least not without manually creating them all as separate albums or by using a script.
Eg.
I have photos from the last 30 years stored in this type of folder structure:
2002
2002-06-23 Mum’s birthday party
— 2002-06-23 Mum’s birthday party-0001.TIF
I’m less interested in using it for photo backup since I’d prefer not to use an automated tool since I curate everything in my library so that it stays organised - I’m looking for something for viewing/displaying and sharing.
Ah, yeah I guess you can't browse your photos using a file system view. I just meant that it won't automatically reorganize your pictures on the file system.
However you can create albums via an API call. You could probably write a script that adds each folder to an album or something.
Immich recently changed license from MIT to AGPL. As far as I understand they can't sinply relicense to a non-free license unless they redo a good chunk of code from the last half a year.
If they still used the MIT license I'd be worried too.
Semantic/licensing quibbles aside, these futo guys seem pretty based (affectionate). They even use the word "normies" in their goals/value statement.
Seriously tho, with power/wealth as lopsided as it is in america, we really need capitalist class traitors to get anything done and I'm glad people like this exist
Piwigo is more like a shared gallery. Users create album/folders and upload individual photos, which other users can access. Piwigo has poor support for videos and no support for Live Photos.
Photoprism has only a single user for the free tier. It supports Live Photos and videos, and individual photo uploads. It does facial recognition tagging.
Immich supports video/Live Photos, facial recognition, and has multiple users, but it expects a full backup/synchronization (not individual photos). Sharing between users is manual, not automatic or permissions-based like Piwigo. Each user has access only to their own backups or shared albums.
In summary, I think Piwigo is the simplest to set up and use, but it doesn’t do much beyond photos - it’s a simple shared gallery. Photoprism is good and stable, but you have to pay a subscription for multiple user accounts. Immich is rapidly developing, which means things will break, but also it has the most features. My only issue with Immich is that I don’t want to use it as a backup - only as a “best of” shared gallery. While it’s possible with Immich, I would have to maintain an Immich album on my phone, and sync only that, and I would have to set up shares with other users manually.
One feature that I hope that Immich adopts is to allow for external libraries to be displayed in an existing folder structure. There’s no built-in way to do this and requires a script that uses albums as a workaround. A lot of photographers have organised folders by date/event that span years/decades, so it’s not practical to create these manually with albums.
The closest I’ve found is a cron script which does album generation automatically, but it’s not a ‘future proof’ solution since it could stop working at any time.
Memories (Nextcloud), Photoprism, and Photoview can do this.