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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​

Both the Settings page and the Admin Area have an On this page list (not released yet). 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 and locations are written to an .xmp file next to the photo. The photo itself is not changed.
    • Save to media file: ratings, dates, rotations, captions and locations are written into the photo file itself. This changes your originals, so keep a backup. HEIC, AVIF and RAW files keep their rotation in LibrePhotos.

    Tags are written as the file's keywords. Not released yet: up to 1.3.0, captions, tags and locations were not written. 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. 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 (not released yet). Their edits stay in LibrePhotos. Not released yet: up to 1.3.0, this setting was called Synchronize metadata to disk.

  • Rating style (not released yet) 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: click Apply under Dates on the Library page afterwards (Applying the rules; not released yet), or run Rescan. Default UTC

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.

Slideshow Options​

  • Slideshow interval sets the time in seconds between photos when using slideshow mode in the lightbox.

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.

  • 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. (Not released yet: 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, face labels 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 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. 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.

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

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

  • Missing photos limit (not released yet) 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.

  • Delete photos from the trash after (not released yet) 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. 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.

Features​

Not released yet. 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. Not released yet: up to 1.3.0, this tool is not in the Admin Area.

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