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Albums

LibrePhotos supports several types of albums to help you organize your photo library.

Album Typesโ€‹

User Albums (My Albums)โ€‹

Albums you create manually to organize photos however you like. You can add any photos to these albums.

People Albumsโ€‹

Automatically generated albums based on face recognition. Each recognized person gets their own album.

Auto Albums (Events)โ€‹

Albums that group your photos into events based on when they were taken. Grouping is purely chronological: a photo joins the current event if it was taken less than 1 day and 12 hours after the previous photo already in that event, so a continuous trip stays a single event however long it runs. An event needs at least two photos โ€” a single photo on its own produces no album. Location and recognized people are not used for the grouping itself; they only feed the album's generated title (for example "Weekend in Paris") and its position on the map.

note

Unlike People, Places and Things albums, event albums are not created during a scan. To create them, open Settings โ†’ Library, find the Event Albums section and click Generate (or run the Generate Event Albums command from the search spotlight), and re-run it after importing new photos. Regenerate Event Titles only refreshes the titles of existing albums, which is useful once you have named faces or after reverse geocoding has filled in place names. See Job System for the underlying jobs.

Places Albumsโ€‹

Automatically generated albums based on the GPS location data in your photos.

Tag Albumsโ€‹

Albums for your own tags โ€” the labels you type yourself, as opposed to the objects the tagging model detects. Every tag gets an album, and the Tags section of the Albums page lists them with a photo count. Tags also come in from your files: keywords stored in a photo's XMP Subject or IPTC Keywords (including .xmp sidecars, so tags applied in Lightroom or digiKam are picked up) become tags during a scan. See Tagging photos below for how to apply them, and Search for finding photos by tag.

Things Albumsโ€‹

Automatically generated albums based on detected objects and scenes in your photos. Things Albums are filtered by the currently active Tagging Model (configurable in Site Settings), so only tags from the selected model are shown. Switching models does not delete your existing tags, but it also does not create tags for the newly selected model โ€” until tags exist for that model, the Things section will look empty. To generate them, run a full Rescan from Settings โ†’ Library (in the Scan Library section, open the dropdown next to Scan and choose Rescan), which retags your existing photos. Albums created from #hashtags you typed into photo captions are always shown, regardless of the active model.

Setting an Album Coverโ€‹

You can customize the cover image for People Albums and User Albums. There are two ways to do this:

  1. Navigate to the album you want to customize (People or User Album)
  2. Click the three-dot menu (โ‹ฎ) in the selection toolbar
  3. Click "Set album cover"
  4. A modal will open showing all photos in the album
  5. Click on the photo you want to use as the cover
  6. The cover is set immediately
tip

The cover picker loads photos in batches of 50 for better performance. Click "Load more photos" to see additional photos if your album is large.

Method 2: Quick Selection (Shortcut)โ€‹

If you already know which photo you want to use:

  1. Navigate to the album
  2. Select exactly one photo โ€” hover over it and click the checkbox that appears in its top-left corner (a plain click on a photo opens it in the lightbox instead of selecting it)
  3. Click the three-dot menu (โ‹ฎ) in the selection toolbar
  4. Click "Set album cover"
  5. The selected photo becomes the cover immediately
note

The "Set album cover" option only appears when you're viewing a People Album or User Album. It won't be visible on other pages like the main timeline or auto-generated albums.

Creating User Albumsโ€‹

  1. Select one or more photos from any view
  2. Click the plus icon (+) in the selection toolbar
  3. Click "Album"
  4. Either:
    • Enter a name for a new album and click "Create"
    • Or click on an existing album to add the photos to it

Renaming and Deleting User Albumsโ€‹

On the Albums page, every User Album card has a three-dot menu (โ‹ฎ) in its top-right corner. From it you can:

  • Rename โ€” enter a new title and confirm. Titles must be unique; the dialog blocks a name that another one of your albums already uses.
  • Sharing โ€” open the album sharing dialog (see the Sharing guide).
  • Delete โ€” a confirmation dialog appears before the album is removed.
caution

Deleting an album is permanent and cannot be undone, but it only removes the album itself. The photos it contained stay in your library.

Sharing Albumsโ€‹

User Albums can be shared with other users on your LibrePhotos instance, or publicly via a link. For full details on all sharing features, see the Sharing guide.

  1. Navigate to the User Album you want to share
  2. Click the three-dot menu (โ‹ฎ) in the selection toolbar
  3. Under "Album Actions", click "Sharing"
  4. Search for and select the users you want to share with

You can share albums publicly with anyone via a unique link, without requiring them to have an account on your LibrePhotos instance:

  1. Navigate to the User Album you want to share publicly
  2. Click the three-dot menu (โ‹ฎ) in the selection toolbar and, under "Album Actions", click "Sharing"
  3. In the dialog, toggle "Public sharing" on โ€” a unique URL slug is generated automatically that you can share with anyone
  4. Click "Show settings" to customize the slug (3โ€“64 characters), set an expiration (7, 30 or 90 days, or never), and control what information visitors can see:
    • Location data
    • Camera information
    • Timestamps
    • Captions
    • Recognized faces

Once an album is public, it appears under Sharing โ†’ Links, where you can copy the link, open it, or reopen the sharing dialog to change its settings. Albums that are not yet public are not listed there.

Default privacy settings for new public links can be configured in Settings โ†’ Public Sharing Defaults.

Public albums are accessible at /public/s/{slug} and include a lightbox viewer with the same navigation experience as the main app.

Tagging photosโ€‹

Tags are yours to type: a place name, a project, "to print", whatever you sort by. A photo can carry any number of them.

Tagging a selectionโ€‹

note

Tagging several photos at once is not in a released image yet. It is available on the dev branch and will appear in the next release.

Anywhere you can select photos โ€” the timeline, a search result, a person, place, thing or user album, or a folder โ€” you can tag the whole selection at once:

  1. Select the photos and videos you want to tag.
  2. Press t, or open the plus menu (๏ผ‹) and click Tags.
  3. Type the tags, separating several with a comma. Suggestions narrow as you type โ€” tags that begin with what you typed come first, so a letter or two is usually enough โ€” and anything new is created for you.
  4. Click Add tags (or press Enter on an empty box).

Every tag in the box is applied to every photo in the selection. Tagging is additive โ€” it never removes a tag a photo already has.

Select all works too: with the whole view selected, the tags apply to everything the current view holds, whatever its filters (including the Photos / Videos selector), minus any photo you unchecked. That is one request for the whole library rather than one per photo, so it stays quick on a large one.

note

t is used instead of Ctrl+T because browsers reserve Ctrl+T for opening a new tab and a web page cannot intercept it.

Tagging one photoโ€‹

Open a photo and use the Tags section of the sidebar โ€” the pencil button opens the same comma-separated editor, and here it both adds and removes: whatever you leave in the box is what the photo ends up with. Click a tag badge to jump to that tag's album.

Renaming, merging and deleting tagsโ€‹

On the Albums page, open Tags โ†’ View all. The three-dot menu on any tag offers:

  • Rename โ€” the tag keeps its photos.
  • Merge โ€” pick another tag to fold into this one; its photos move over and it is deleted.
  • Delete โ€” removes the tag. Your photos are untouched.
note

Tags are per user: two accounts can each have a tag called holiday without seeing each other's.

A tag outlives its photos. Trashing, hiding or deleting the last photo that carried a tag leaves the tag in place: it stays in the Tags list with a placeholder tile so you can still rename or delete it, and its own page tells you it is empty. That is deliberate โ€” you may well want to create a tag before anything carries it, and deleting photos should never silently delete tags.

caution

A tag you add in LibrePhotos is not written back into the image file yet. A tag that came from a file's keywords stays in that file, but new tags live only in LibrePhotos' database.

Removing Photos from Albumsโ€‹

To remove photos from a User Album:

  1. Navigate to the User Album
  2. Select the photos you want to remove
  3. Click the three-dot menu (โ‹ฎ)
  4. Click "Remove Photos"
caution

This only removes the photos from the album. The original photos remain in your library.