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🔧 Settings

There are three kinds of settings at the moment.

Profile​

You can find your profile settings by clicking in the top right corner and click on Profile.

Here you can change your name, photo, e-mail address, password and language. You can also set whether you want your profile to be accessible globally or not.

  • Avatar, First name, Last name will be shown if you share pictures with other users or when your profile is publically accessible
  • E-mail is the address your password-reset link is sent to. The Forgot your password? link only appears on the login page once an administrator has configured outgoing e-mail (Admin Area → Site Settings → Email (SMTP)), and resetting your own password only works if your account has an e-mail address set. If it does not, an administrator can still reset your password for you under Admin Area → Users.
  • Change password is for changing your password
  • Language will change the settings
  • Public Sharing will set if you can be found globally

Settings​

These settings are user specific and will affect how scanning and saving works. At the bottom, you can also find experimental settings.

Finding a section​

New in 1.4.0 Both the Settings page and the Admin Area have an On this page list. On a wide screen it sits to the right of the cards; on a phone or a narrow window it is a row of buttons under the top bar that scrolls sideways. The entry of the card you are looking at is highlighted, and picking one scrolls to its card.

Every card also has its own link. Hover over a card's title and click the # next to it to copy the link, for example https://photos.example.com/settings#settings-faces or /admin#admin-services. Opening such a link scrolls straight to that card and outlines it for a moment, which is handy when you point someone to a setting.

Scan Confidence​

This setting affect how much certainty is needed for a tag to be added to a picture. Default Standard

If you set this to Top 100,Top 50, Top 10 you will get semantic search results instead of just looking at the EXIF data. It is disabled as default, because the first search takes a minute to get a response. After that it is fast. Default Disabled. For more information, see Search.

Metadata Options​

  • Write edits to files copies some of your edits into your files, so other apps see them. Each option says what it writes. Default Off.

    • Off: edits stay in LibrePhotos. Your files are never changed.
    • Save to sidecar: ratings, dates, rotations, captions, tags, locations and rights are written to an .xmp file next to the photo (an existing one, else a new IMG.jpg.xmp, see Which sidecar is written). The photo itself is not changed.
    • Save to media file: ratings, dates, rotations, captions, tags, locations and rights are written into the photo file itself. This changes your originals, so keep a backup. Rotations are only written into JPEG, PNG, TIFF and WebP files; other formats, such as HEIC, AVIF and RAW, keep their rotation in LibrePhotos.

    Tags are written as the file's keywords. New in 1.5.0 Copyright notices, creators and licenses are written too (Copyright and licenses); titles are not. Face names are written only with Write face tags to image files (see Face Options). The tags each edit writes are listed in EXIF Data, and Undoing write-back says how to take them back. While you edit a date, caption, tags or location in the photo details sidebar, a line under the editor says whether that edit reaches the file. Photos imported from Nextcloud are never written to: LibrePhotos works on a local copy, which the next scan replaces when the file changes on the server, and nothing is uploaded back. Their edits stay in LibrePhotos. New in 1.4.0 Up to 1.3.0, this setting was called Synchronize metadata to disk, it wrote no captions, tags or locations, and it did write into the local copies of Nextcloud photos.

  • New in 1.4.0 Write existing edits to files, under the choice above, writes the edits you made before turning it on, which are only in LibrePhotos, with Write now. It writes what your photos carry: ratings above 0, dates and locations you set by hand, rotations, captions you wrote, tags (as keywords) and, with Write face tags to image files on, face tags. A photo without any of these gets no write and no new sidecar. The sentence above the button names the kinds and the number of photos; the dialog before it starts lists each kind with its count. Into sidecars it is a plain confirm; into media files it asks in red, because your originals change. It runs as a Write Metadata to Files job: the row shows how far it got, and the job list has the photos that could not be written. The button waits while Write edits to files is Off or has a change you have not saved. See Writing the edits of a whole library. New in 1.5.0 It also writes the copyright, creator and license you set in LibrePhotos.

  • New in 1.4.0 Rating style picks how you rate photos on the web. Default Favorites.

    • Favorites: one star toggle. Adding a favorite sets the photo's rating to the minimum rating below; removing a favorite sets the rating to 0. That also clears a star rating the photo had, for example a 5-star rating from Lightroom or digiKam, and with Write edits to files on, the 0 is written to the file too.
    • Stars: rate photos with 1 to 5 stars in the photo viewer (keys 0 to 5) and on the photo page, see their stars on the grid, and set them for a selection with Set rating. The favorite toggle is gone in this mode, so a rating only changes when you set it. See Rating photos with stars.

  • Minimum image rating to interpret as favorite will change how favorites are read and saved. EXIF only supports the rating field and does not have a favorite field. In Stars mode it still decides which photos the Favorites page and the timeline's favorites filter show. Default 4

  • Default timezone is used by the date rules that say "in user default timezone" (for example video creation times, which cameras store in UTC, and file times), and to decide which day Memories counts as today. It does not change how dates are displayed, and LibrePhotos never writes it to your files. Changing it does not re-date photos already in your library: run Rescan, or New in 1.4.0 click Apply under Dates on the Library page afterwards (Applying the rules). Default UTC

  • New in 1.5.0 Rights for your photos, a card of its own under the metadata options, holds the creator, copyright notice ({year} becomes the year a photo was taken) and license your photos get when their files state none: new photos when they are scanned, the photos you already have when you click Apply to my photos…, which asks whether to fill in only what is missing or change every photo. See Copyright and licenses.

Set date & time parsing rules​

Here you can set how timestamps are parsed. You can find more information here

Set burst detection rules​

Below the date and time rules is a Burst Detection Rules editor. It defines the ordered list of rules used when stack detection looks for burst sequences — photos taken in rapid succession.

Rules fall into two categories, shown as a Hard or Soft badge:

  • Hard rules are deterministic and enabled by default: EXIF Burst Mode Tag, EXIF Sequence Number and Filename Burst Pattern (for names such as IMG_001_BURST001 or photo (1)).
  • Soft rules are estimates and are present but disabled by default: Timestamp Proximity (photos within about two seconds from the same camera) and Visual Similarity (visually similar consecutive photos).

For each rule you can toggle it on or off, delete it, or drag it to reorder the list. Add Rule opens a searchable catalogue of further rules — including Filename Burst Suffix Only, Custom Filename Pattern and a looser Timestamp Proximity (Loose) (about five seconds, any camera). Reset to Defaults restores the default set. Each rule's parameters are fixed and shown for reference only; there is no parameter editor here.

Experimental options​

Always transcode videos converts every video to H.264 as you play it, including the ones your browser could have played as they are. You rarely need it: a video your browser cannot play is converted anyway, without this switch (see Videos your browser cannot play). Conversions are capped at 720 lines, so turning this on also means watching a 4K video at 720p.

The first time you play a video that is being converted, it is converted as it plays. A conversion happening live has no known length, so that first play has no duration and cannot be sought — the scrub bar and the seek shortcuts do nothing, and the player says so. Once you are done watching, that same conversion is written to a file in the background — afterwards rather than at the same time, so it never slows down the video you are watching — and every later play of that video is served from it: an ordinary video with a duration, a working scrub bar and working seek keys.

Converted copies are kept under protected_media/transcoded/ and cost somewhere between 10 and 20 MB per minute of video, depending on how much movement there is in it. The store is capped and prunes the videos you have not watched for longest; an administrator can change the ceiling, or turn the whole thing off, with TRANSCODE_CACHE_MAX_GB.

Caption Context​

These switches tell the captioning model what LibrePhotos already knows about a photo, so the caption can say who is in it and where it was taken. All are on by default.

  • Tell the captioning model what LibrePhotos knows about a photo turns the context on. Default On
  • Use the names of recognised people in captions includes the name of a recognised person in the prompt so it can appear in the caption. Only available while the switch above is on. Default On
  • Mention where the photo was taken in captions includes the photo's geocoded location in the prompt. Only available while the switch above is on. Default On

See Image Captioning for the captioning model itself.

Interface​

  • Slideshow interval sets the time in seconds between photos when using slideshow mode in the lightbox.
  • New in 1.5.0 Show what's new after updates After LibrePhotos is updated, a small What's new card shows the highlights of the new version once, in the corner of the first page you open. Turn it off to never see the card. Account menu > What's new shows the highlights at any time either way. Default On. See The What's new card.

Face Options​

Most of these settings control how face clustering groups the faces in your library, which is what you work with when labelling people. How sure a suggested match must be is set on the face dashboard with its % confident filter, not here.

  • New in 1.5.0 Minimum face size skips the faces the face detector finds that are smaller than a share of the photo's shorter side, such as strangers far in the background or faces in a crowd. Options are Off, 2%, 4% and 8%; next to them, an example photo marks with a dashed red box the faces a choice skips, and the line under them says what it means in pixels (4% is under 43 px on a 1080 px tall photo). It applies to photos scanned from now on: faces found already stay (delete them on the face dashboard), and face regions saved in the file and faces you draw by hand are always kept. Default Off.
  • Minimum Cluster Size changes how clusters form; a smaller value results in more clusters. Options are Auto, 2, 4, 8 and 16. Default Auto, which lets LibrePhotos choose for you.
  • Minimum Samples changes how conservative clustering is; a smaller value is less conservative. Options are 1, 2, 4, 8 and 16. Default 1
  • Cluster Selection Epsilon merges clusters whose faces are this close; a higher value merges more of one person's clusters, and Very High can also join look-alikes such as siblings. Options are Off (0), Small (0.9), Normal (0.95), High (1.0) and Very High (1.05), distances between face encodings scaled to length 1 (two photos of one person are about 0.9 apart). Default Normal. New in 1.4.0 Up to 1.3.0 the options were 0.025 to 0.2, too small to merge anything at all. A saved choice keeps its name when you update.
  • Write face tags to image files when enabled, a photo's faces are written as XMP MWG-RS region tags to a sidecar file or to your image files, as chosen under Write edits to files, whenever you label, add, delete or restore a face (with that setting Off the switch is disabled and nothing is written), so face data stays portable across apps like Lightroom, digiKam and XnView. The names of the people are added to the photo's keywords. See Face regions. Default Off

Public Sharing Defaults​

These switches decide what public links show. Photo links always use them, including links you already created, so turning one off hides that detail on every public photo link at once. Album links use them unless the album's own link settings override them. All are off by default.

  • Share photo timestamps: show when photos were taken.
  • Share location information: show where photos were taken.
  • Share camera information: show the camera make, model and settings.
  • Share captions: show photo descriptions.
  • Share detected faces: show the people recognised in photos.

New in 1.5.0 While the admin has the public gallery open, a Public gallery card follows: Show my public photos in the public gallery (off by default) puts your public photos on the server's front page next to everyone else's. Next to it, What visitors see of your photos lists what the gallery shows, from the switches above.

New in 1.5.0 Up to 1.4.0, these switches were not saved: after Save Changes they were off again on the next visit, and public links shared none of these details unless an album link turned them on.

Duplicate Detection​

These are your personal defaults for the Detection Options dropdown on the Duplicates page — they pre-fill that dropdown before you click Detect Duplicates, rather than running anything on their own. See Duplicate Detection for the review workflow.

  • The Visual sensitivity default controls how aggressively visual duplicates are matched: Strict (fewest matches, highest confidence), Normal (the balanced default) or Loose (most matches, but may include false positives). Default Normal
  • The Clear pending duplicates default determines whether previously pending duplicate results are cleared before a new detection run starts. Default Off

Admin Area​

These are settings that apply to the whole instance. Besides the panels below, the Admin Area also hosts the Services and Server Logs panels, documented in Library Management.

Site Settings​

  • Allow user registration will enable a sign up button on the login page.

  • Allow uploads sets if uploading should be possible or not

  • New in 1.5.0 Single sign-on A group with the switches for logging in through an OpenID Connect identity provider: Show the single sign-on button, Button label and Allow sign-ups over single sign-on. It lists the providers set up in the Django admin and warns when SSO cannot work yet. See Single sign-on.

  • New in 1.5.0 Check for new releases On by default. Once a day the backend asks github.com which LibrePhotos release is the newest; nothing about your server is sent. A line under the switch says what the last check found: up to date, a newer release (or that you skipped it, with Show it again), that the check failed, or that it is off. It is locked off when the server's UPDATE_CHECK environment variable is false, and development builds have nothing to compare. See Checking for new releases and The Update available card.

  • New in 1.5.0 Show users what's new after an update On by default. After an update, each user sees a small What's new card once with the highlights of the new version, which are part of the app: nothing is downloaded. Turn it off to hide the card for everyone; each user can also turn it off for themselves under Settings > Interface. See The What's new card.

  • Not released yet (comes after 1.5.1) Ask admins to support LibrePhotos On by default. Once, when an admin's library has been scanned and processed for the first time, a thank-you dialog shows what LibrePhotos found, what the same storage would cost in Google One or iCloud+, and links to star the project on GitHub, sponsor it or donate through PayPal. Closing it, or opening one of its links, hides it for good. Rewind's last slide asks admins too. Other users are never asked for money: their Rewind ends with a link to star the project. Turn it off to never ask admins either.

  • Not released yet (comes after 1.5.1) Show Rewind around Christmas On by default. Between 20 December and 6 January, each user sees their Rewind once: their year in photos (how many they took, their busiest day and month, the people and places they photographed most), worked out on your server from their own photos. It does not open by itself for a year with fewer than 10 photos. During that time Account menu > Your Rewind opens it either way. Turn it off to keep it from opening by itself.

  • Skip patterns Comma delimited list of patterns to ignore (e.g. '@eaDir,#recycle' for synology devices)

  • New in 1.4.0 Missing photos limit The largest share of one user's photos that a scan may mark missing at once. Default 50%. When more than this share of the photos, and more than 100 photos, would lose all their files, the scan changes nothing and its job fails with "... photos would be marked missing. Nothing was changed. Is the library mounted?". This protects the library when a disk or share is not mounted (see Missing Photos). If you really removed most of a library, set it to 100% (off), scan, and set it back.

  • New in 1.4.0 Scan libraries automatically Scans every user's library for new and changed files on a schedule: Off (the default), Every hour, Every day at a time, or Custom days at a time, in the server's time zone. A user whose scan is still running is skipped, so scans never pile up. A line under the setting says what the last run did and when the next one is. See Auto scan.

  • New in 1.4.0 Delete photos from the trash after Days a photo stays in a user's trash before a daily task deletes it for good, together with its original files on disk. Default 0, which never deletes anything on its own. Turning it on or shortening it first asks, with the number of photos the next cleanup would delete. See Trash.

  • Map Provider Select which geocoding service converts GPS coordinates into place names. Options are Nominatim (free, no key required), Mapbox, MapTiler, OpenCage, and TomTom.

  • API key for Map Provider Only shown after you select a commercial provider (Mapbox, MapTiler, OpenCage, or TomTom), where it is required. It is not shown for Nominatim, which needs no key.

  • Map Tiles Where the map background is loaded from. Options are PhotoPrism (the default), OpenStreetMap, or None to hide maps entirely. Opening a map reveals the approximate location of your photos to the selected provider. This is separate from the map provider above, which only affects reverse geocoding.

  • Captioning Model LFM2.5-VL (the default) or None to turn automatic captioning off. See Image Captioning.

  • Text Recognition (OCR) Model None (the default) keeps text recognition off. PP-OCRv6 Tiny, PP-OCRv6 Small or PP-OCRv6 Medium turn it on, after a confirmation, because all readable text of every photo is then stored in the database. New in 1.5.0 The next scan or upload then starts reading the whole library. See Text Recognition (OCR).

  • Face Recognition Model Select which InsightFace model is used to detect and recognise faces. Options:

    • buffalo_sc — Lightweight model (default). Fastest and smallest, a good fit for most setups.
    • buffalo_s / buffalo_m / buffalo_l — Progressively larger and more accurate, at the cost of more memory and compute.
    • antelopev2 — High-accuracy model for the best recognition quality.

    Saving a new model queues a Download models job immediately (if the model pack is not already present). Only faces encoded after the switch use the new model — existing faces keep the embeddings they were created with. Train faces does not re-encode them; it only generates embeddings for faces that have none yet and then re-clusters. For this reason, choose a model before your first face scan: switching later leaves your library comparing embeddings produced by two different models. See Face recognition.

New in 1.5.0 The Public gallery card decides who the public gallery is open to: one page of the public photos of every user who takes part, at your server's address.

  • Off (the default): there is no gallery. The server's address opens the login page, and the gallery's pages and API answer "not found".
  • Members only: every signed-in user finds the gallery under Sharing, and sees it exactly as a visitor would. Use it to try the gallery out before anyone outside sees it.
  • Everyone: the server's address opens the gallery for anyone who is not signed in, without an account. Log in stays in its top right corner.

Opening it to more people first asks, with how many photos of how many users it shows and the names of the users with the most photos. Users take part only after they turn on Show my public photos in the public gallery in their settings; nobody does by default. Their public photos stay public either way, on their own links.

  • Let search engines index the public gallery: Off by default. While it is off, the gallery's page and answers ask search engines not to list them (noindex): the API answers and, with the unified image and the Windows app, the page itself carry an X-Robots-Tag header. With the separate frontend container of the default Docker Compose setup, the page says it in a robots meta tag that its script adds, which search engines that run scripts read; a reverse proxy in front can add X-Robots-Tag: noindex for / and /public as well.

The gallery is rate limited per user and, without an account, per address by PUBLIC_GALLERY_THROTTLE_RATE (see Rate limits).

Features​

New in 1.4.0 Below the Site Settings card, the Features card has one switch per optional feature: Face detection, Face clustering, Image captioning, Things, Place names and Videos. Switch off what you do not need to make scans faster; what a feature already made (faces, names, captions, Things, place names) stays. A switch saves at once. A switch that the server's FEATURE_* environment variable turned off is disabled and marked Locked. For a feature that runs on a model, a line under the switch says whether the model is ready or shows its download. See Feature Toggles.

Email (SMTP)​

Below the Features card is an Email (SMTP) card that configures outgoing e-mail. Outgoing e-mail must be set up here, or the Forgot your password? flow silently does nothing (the server logs the failure but never reveals whether an address exists).

  • Provider chooses how mail is sent: Disabled, Custom SMTP server, SendGrid, Mailgun, Postmark, Brevo, SMTP2GO or Amazon SES. The hosted providers use built-in server presets, so you only supply a From address, Username and API key. Custom SMTP server (and Amazon SES, for the host) additionally shows the SMTP host; Custom SMTP server also shows Port, Use STARTTLS and Use implicit SSL.
  • From address is the address mail is sent from.
  • Username is the login for the provider. For SendGrid, leave this blank — it uses the literal username apikey.
  • Password / API key is write-only: it is encrypted before it is stored and never returned by the API. Leaving the field blank keeps the existing credential unchanged; use Remove the stored credential to delete it (it asks first, since most providers refuse to send mail, password reset links included, until a credential is entered again).
  • Send test email sends a test message to your own account's e-mail address to check the configuration end to end. It stays disabled until the configuration is valid.

Admin Tools​

  • Delete all auto created albums removes every automatically generated event album in one step. Your photos are not affected.
  • Download Server Stats saves a serverstats.json report — see Server Stats for what it contains.
  • Remove photo details from old thumbnails starts a job that removes the location and other photo details from thumbnails made by LibrePhotos 1.2.1 or older. Your photos are not changed. While it runs, the row shows how far it got and links to the job. See After upgrading from 1.2.1 or older. New in 1.4.0 Up to 1.3.0, this tool was not in the Admin Area.
  • Look up place names again asks the current Map Provider for the place of every photo with a location, for every user, after a confirmation, for example after switching to ExifTool. Places albums under the old names end up empty. With an online provider it can take hours. See Switching the provider. New in 1.4.0 Up to 1.3.0, switching the provider never renamed photos already named.

Users​

The admin can change here the scan directory, upload folder and password for users, or add new users to the system. Deleting a user keeps their photos and albums under a placeholder account, turns off their public links and removes nothing from disk. See Managing users.

Worker Logs​

Shows how far jobs are progressed. For more information, go here