Family Immich setup: own library per user, or admin-only with album sharing? Real-world experiences welcome
I keep going back and forth on this and would love to hear how people actually live with their decision.
Setup: ~500 GB photo archive, family subfolder of ~100 GB. Me as admin + 3 family users. Workflow is annual consolidation — I curate albums throughout the year and once a year reorganize them back into the external library folder structure as the canonical archive.
The dilemma: Family members ideally get the full Immich UX for shared family content — timeline integration, memories, people search. But Immich is fundamentally one-user-one-library, and sharing albums doesn't give recipients any of that.
The three options I've thought through:
1 - Multi-user libraries — each family member mounts the family folder as their own external library
Pros: full UX for everyone, including memories
Cons: family folder gets indexed N+1 times. Thumbnails, face detection, DB entries scale linearly with users
2 - Single admin source — only admin has the library, shares curated albums
Pros: minimal resources, simplest setup, easy album curation from multiple sources
Cons: family members lose memories, timeline integration, people search — they only see what's explicitly shared as an album
3 - Dedicated "Family" service account — non-personal account owns the family folder
Pros: clean ownership separation, semantic clarity
Cons: cross-account album curation is painful (sharing chains needed to merge assets from multiple accounts into one album), same UX limits as option 2 for family members
Where I'm leaning: option 1, mostly because of memories. But the resource cost is real, especially after changing something at the Family folders of the external library.
Which did you pick, and how's it actually held up over time?
If multi-user: how does it scale? RAM during scans, face detection time, DB size in practice?
Anything I'm missing? Some workaround that gives shared library semantics?
Tips for the annual consolidation workflow when album sources span multiple accounts?
Thanks! I wrote the post myself, but had it reworded and translated by AI.