👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Manage multiple user

Manage User

Click on your Avatar → Admin Area to navigate to your user panel.

The user panel is at the bottom of the page above the worker logs.

You can create, delete and manage users of your instance. You can change the scan path, password, name and e-mail of a given user.

Please note: In LibrePhotos, the file system acts as the definitive source of photo organization. This means that folder structure dictates how photos are grouped and accessed within the application.

To isolate users and their photo collections, create a subfolder for each user inside the folder you set as scanDirectory in your .env file — the folder LibrePhotos mounts as /data. Inside LibrePhotos these show up as /data/user1, /data/user2, etc., and that is the path you assign as each user's scan directory. Create the folders before assigning them: LibrePhotos only accepts directories that already exist under /data. This ensures that users only see and interact with the photos in their designated directories.

Scan directories of different users must not overlap. Every photo belongs to exactly one user, so LibrePhotos refuses a scan directory that is the same as, inside, or above another user's scan directory, and names the user it clashes with. In particular, once one user scans /data itself, no other user can be given any folder under /data, so give every user a folder of their own, the admin included. Installations that already have overlapping scan directories keep working and those users can still be edited; only changing a scan directory to one that overlaps is refused.

If your admin account already scans /data and you want to add more users, move the admin's photos into a subfolder such as /data/admin, set that as the admin's scan directory and run a scan. The moved photos are matched to their existing entries by their content, so ratings, faces and albums are kept; see Missing Photos for how that relinking works.

To let several users see the same photos, keep the photos in one user's library and share them from there: albums and individual photos can be shared with other users on the instance, see Sharing.

While the application saves metadata (e.g., tags, albums, facial recognition data) on a per-user basis in its database, it doesn’t inherently restrict access to the photos themselves. Access permissions must be managed through the file system / paths.

The separation will also not keep the photos "private" as the admin of the host system can see all the images.

Giving each user their own folder automatically

Admin Area → Site settings has a Create a folder for each new user switch, off by default. With it on, creating a user — from the admin panel, from self registration, or through single sign-on — also creates /data/<username> and assigns it as that user's scan directory, so you no longer have to make the folder on the host and assign it by hand for every account.

It only works when your own scan directory is a subfolder such as /data/admin, not /data itself. Scan directories of different users cannot overlap (see above), so while any user scans /data, every /data/<username> folder is refused.

What it deliberately does not do:

• It never overwrites a scan directory you typed on the create form. An explicit path wins.
• It never fails account creation. If /data is read-only, the username does not name a plain folder (such as . or ..), or the folder would overlap a directory another user already scans, the account is still created — just without a scan directory — and the reason is written to the backend log. Nothing is created on disk in that case. Assign a directory by hand afterwards.
• It does not give a self-registered or single sign-on account a folder that already exists. Otherwise anyone who can sign up could take over, say, /data/family just by choosing family as their username. Such an account is created without a scan directory instead. When you create a user in the admin panel and /data/<username> already exists, that folder is assigned, since you can see what is in it.
• It does not touch existing users. Only accounts created while the switch is on get a folder.

User Registration

Click on your Avatar → Admin Area to the user registration setting.

You can also activate user registration, where user can create an account themselves. They cannot change the path, which means the admin is still in full control.

Unless Create a folder for each new user is on, a self-registered account is created without a scan directory, so the new user sees an empty library and is told to contact their administrator if they try to scan or upload. After someone signs up, open the Admin Area, edit their account in the user panel at the bottom of the page and set its scan path as described above.

How to change the admin password, when you can't log in

There are three ways to accomplish that:

• 1. If your .env sets the admin credentials, the password is reset every time the backend container starts. The keys are userName, userPass and adminEmail (passed to the backend as ADMIN_USERNAME, ADMIN_PASSWORD and ADMIN_EMAIL), and both the username and password must be non-empty. They are not in the shipped librephotos.env template, so add them yourself — see Admin account variables for the full behaviour.
• 2. If you have access to your container, you can change the password by executing a Django management command docker exec -it [backend container name] python manage.py changepassword [admin username]
• 3. If outgoing e-mail is configured on your instance, the login page shows a Forgot your password? link that e-mails a reset link to the address on your account. This only works once e-mail is set up (Admin Area → Site settings → Email) and the account has an e-mail address, so arrange both before you get locked out. Behind the bundled proxy, also set frontendBaseUrl in your .env (passed to the backend as FRONTEND_BASE_URL) so the emailed link points at your public address rather than the internal one.