[Feature] <multi-account/profile switching support>

[monkeyotg]

The feature

Do you have any plans to add multi-account/profile switching support?

My Use Case 1:
I host Immich on my home server/computer. And to avoid losing the connection when I am out somewhere, I use Zerotier to create a Virtual LAN Connection. In this case, I even need to keep Zerotier running on my phone when I return home, back to the real LAN environment.

My Use Case 2:
I have 3 accounts set up for now.
One for my phone photos
One for my camera photos
One for my reference photo collection
Now I use the account for phone photos as the main account and access the pictures from the other two accounts via sharing. But in reality, I don't want these accounts to be associated in any way. It makes the list under the Sharing tab way too long.

So if with a multi-account/profile switching feature, it would be very helpful.

Platform

• Server
• Web
• Mobile

[etnoy]

There are no current plans, although I personally would like the same features. Just like you say, it would be useful to have several independent libraries of photos that have different uses. Especially my boxes and boxes of scanned slides and negatives that can't be timestamped in a useful way

[monkeyotg]

Totally understandable, I mean,
it's a "better to have" feature. not something essential.
and your boxes and boxes of scanned slides and negatives.

But anyway Immich did a pretty good job! Glad to have such a solution for the photo library.

[zdimension]

A simple account switcher like Google's would be really nice!

I have an account for my personal (phone) photos and an account for the family photos (cameras, scanned slides, ...).

[bo0tzz]

Fwiw while not "native"/built-in, this should be pretty easy to accomplish with an oauth server.

[RogerHartmann]

I have another use case to throug in:

• while at home, I use a direct connection to my immich server.
• while outside home, I have setup an nginx proxy

The proxy solution is slower compared to the direct connection (maybe because my thin client does not have that much computing power)

Ideally, this could be realized as a fall-back solution, so if 1 server/account is not reachable, the fall-back would be used.

Well, a little bit different use case to the ones described above.

[fakeboboliu]

If we can switch accounts from the client side quickly, it would resolve most of the issues in #12614 without too much complexity.

Something like Synology Photos's "shared space" can be easily archived by sharing an account.

Does it make this feature much more nice to have?

[mmomjian]

No, we have a different vision for Better Sharing that is far beyond easy account switching.

[eagle470]

It would be good to have this as I don't want my user account to be an admin account. Separation of duties and all.

Beyond that, allowing management of child accounts would be nice, or being able to have read/write permissions to other users libraries. I would find the ability to share a library as r/w an acceptable solution.

Arguably, I would say the main point would be to be able to search through a library without have to see every single picture in the account.

So maybe allowing for search on specific albums and then being able to select to see those photos on the "roll" or the explore page, or not, would be suitable.

I don't want my memes, expense receipts and family photos all rolled together.

[Handrail9]

+1 on the memes and family photos being separated. I'm a data hoarder and trying to search all thru all my memes for family photos is currently a chore.

[rijndael86]

What happened with this? Will it move forward?

In Android you could make do with any of the solutions to install multiple instances of one app, but on iOS you can only have one, the other choice is to use the web version on safari and not be able to see full resolution photos...

[Finke3]

I‘m also interested in this feature. I want so split my photos from my mirror less camera and the daily snapshots with my mobile phone. Two separate profiles / timelines would be great, so that they are not mixed but still easily accessible.

[KBrygger]

Multi server/account would be a very welcome feature. For me, to be able to test features, upgrades and functionality on my test server, before upgrading my prod server.

[marvil6]

I agree! It would be super useful for those of us with different family / personal / hobby / etc. accounts. I implemented it (fully functional) in #24857, but it was rejected for being too niche, which is understandable.

You can clone my fork and use that, but since I want actual updates (lol), I created a workaround for web; which you can find here. It's very very janky and I would love official support (and for the mobile app as well)!

[fakeboboliu]

I don't understand why having multiple accounts itself would be considered too niche, considering that self-hosting a photo service is already a too niche operation.
But thank you very much for your attempt: you tried it before I had the energy and decided to invest the work into completing such a PR.

[probablyjassin]

are we allowed to reopen this in a new discussion since it was closed as outdated?

[fakeboboliu]

Maybe not, the org members don't seem to like the idea.

Of course, the reason for close might also be they have already figured out a more elegant way to solve this problem.

[harryfiedify]

Hmm, yes, but which solution might that be?

[BreadJS]

Can we contribute to this Idea? Cause I will make this work if this needs to work. Cause I really need this.

[bo0tzz]

We decided end of last year that we don't want account switching in Immich (#24857). We're working on sharing improvements (#12614) that should help decrease the need for it.

[daniele-athome]

Just wanted to add my 2 cents - probably someone else already said it: the most useful use case for this feature would actually be on mobile, i.e. to allow connecting to multiple servers.

For web browsing, using separate browser containers will do.