Background

I use immich for self-hosted photo management. Early complaints were about a lack of support for existing collections of photos.

External Libraries are the current solution, however these cannot be shared with multiple users. I had spent a lot of time naming people and “liking” my photos and I didn’t want to lose this work.

Fortunately I am not the only person with this idea, and Issue#6979 provides most of the solution.

We moved away from our oauth-tied to an application account which we share information.

As an aside, immich requires email addresses for each account and we don’t share one. Here we used cloudflare email routing and the application-account we created was tied to my domain. We then forward emails to this account@mydomain to our regular gmail accounts.

Changes

In the end we created a "third-party" account

Following the Immich FAQ we:

Identify your user ids with

SELECT id, email FROM users;

In addition to the immich FAQ, you will also likely want to update the ’libaries’::

UPDATE libraries SET "ownerId" = '<destinationId>' WHERE "ownerId" = '<sourceId>';