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🔗 Sharing

LibrePhotos offers multiple ways to share your photos and albums — with other users on your instance, or publicly with anyone via a link.

The Sharing Page​

The Sharing page (accessible from the navigation) is your central hub for all sharing activity. It provides an overview of:

  • Public photos — Other users on your instance who have made their profile public
  • Shared with you — Photos and albums that others have shared with you
  • You shared — Photos and albums you have shared with others
  • Public Links — Albums and photos you've shared publicly via link. An album card shows the album's title and number of photos; a photo card says Share link and when you made the link, or Public photo and the day the photo was taken. (Not released yet: up to 1.3.0, photo cards had no caption.)

Sharing Albums with Users​

You can share any user album with other users on your LibrePhotos instance:

  1. Navigate to the album you want to share
  2. Open the ⋮ (Album actions) at the right of the album's header and choose Sharing
  3. Search for users and toggle sharing on or off for each

You can also open the same dialog from the share action on the album's card under Albums, or, while selecting photos, from the selection bar's three-dot menu (⋮) under Album Actions.

Shared albums show up in the recipient's sharing area: they open Sharing, click the Shared with you tile, then the Albums tab (the page is titled Albums others shared).

Sharing Photos with Users​

You can share individual photos (or a selection of photos) with other users:

  1. Select one or more photos from any view
  2. Click the three-dot menu (⋮) and, under Photo Actions, choose "Sharing"
  3. Search for users and toggle sharing on or off for each

Shared photos show up in the recipient's sharing area, grouped by the person who shared them: they open Sharing, click the Shared with you tile, then the Photos tab (the page is titled Photos others shared).

You can create a public link for any user album, making it accessible to anyone — even people without an account on your LibrePhotos instance.

  1. Navigate to the album you want to share publicly
  2. Open the sharing dialog (three-dot menu → "Sharing")
  3. Toggle "Public sharing" on
  4. A unique URL slug is generated automatically

The public album is accessible at https://your-instance/public/s/{slug}.

The dialog shows it as the Album link, with buttons to copy it and to open it in a new tab.

Under the album link, the dialog also shows a Slideshow link: the same address with ?slideshow=1 added (https://your-instance/public/s/{slug}?slideshow=1), with its own copy and open buttons. Whoever opens it sees the album start as a slideshow from its first photo, in the lightbox, instead of the photo grid. It is handy for a photo frame, a TV or a party screen.

  • The slideshow link is the album link with a different start: it shows the same photos and the same Photo Details, expires with the album link, and stops working when you turn public sharing off. There is no separate link to revoke.
  • Visitors have no LibrePhotos settings, so a photo stays on screen for 5 seconds. They can change the interval in the lightbox, pause with the play button or s, and step through with the arrow keys.
  • The slideshow stops at the last photo. Closing the lightbox shows the album's photo grid, and the address goes back to the plain album link.
  • When the visitor's device asks for reduced motion, photos cross-fade instead of zooming in.

Only whole albums can be shared as a slideshow: there is no slideshow link for a hand-picked selection of photos. Put the photos in an album and share that.

Not released yet: up to 1.3.0, a public album link always opened on the photo grid.

Toggle "Public sharing" off again and the link stops working immediately. The slug is burned at the same time, so turning public sharing back on generates a brand-new URL rather than reviving the old one. Anyone who still holds the withdrawn link, including someone you shared it with by mistake, keeps getting a "not found" page.

This also means a custom slug is not kept across a revoke: set it again after re-enabling the link if you want it back.

When public sharing is enabled, click Show settings in the sharing dialog to expand the configuration panel. From there you can configure:

Custom Slug​

Change the URL slug to something memorable — 3–64 characters using only lowercase letters, digits and hyphens. Capitals you type are converted to lowercase automatically; spaces, underscores and other punctuation are rejected. Slugs must be unique across the instance, and the field checks availability as you type. For example: summer-vacation-2025 → /public/s/summer-vacation-2025.

Expiration​

Expiration is optional. Pick any expiry date and time with the date picker (down to the second), or use the built-in 7 days, 30 days or 90 days presets in the picker's dropdown for a quick choice. Click Never (or clear the field) to remove the expiry so the link never expires. After expiration, the link no longer works.

Photo Details​

The Photo Details panel fine-tunes what information visitors can see when they open a photo in a public album:

SettingWhat it controls
Share photo timestampsWhether photo dates and times are visible
Share location informationWhether GPS coordinates and place names are shown
Share camera informationWhether camera model, lens, focal length, aperture, ISO, and shutter speed are shown
Share captionsWhether AI-generated or manual captions are visible
Share detected facesWhether recognized people's names are displayed

Each of these settings can be toggled independently per album. When left unset, the user-level defaults from your settings are used; you can configure those in Settings → Public Sharing Defaults.

All five are off by default — both as the built-in fallback and as the initial value of your user-level defaults, following a privacy-first, opt-in approach. So on a brand-new public link, visitors don't see any of these per-photo details until you turn the relevant options on.

These settings cover what the page shows. The images themselves carry no hidden metadata: thumbnails are stored without the photo's EXIF and XMP (GPS position, camera serial number, keywords), keeping only the colour profile. Thumbnails created by 1.2.1 and older may still contain it. An admin cleans them once after upgrading, with Remove photo details from old thumbnails in Admin Area > Admin Tools or the strip_thumbnail_metadata command; see After upgrading from 1.2.1 or older. Videos are played from the original file, so a video keeps whatever its camera recorded, including the location.

caution

Changes to the slug, expiration and Photo Details settings are not applied until you click "Save link settings" at the bottom of the settings panel. That button stays disabled until you change something; the Public sharing toggle itself only saves the on/off state.

The Public Album Experience​

Visitors to a public album link see:

  • A photo grid with the album's photos
  • A Play slideshow button above the grid (a play icon on a phone), which starts the same slideshow as the slideshow link
  • A lightbox viewer for browsing individual photos; the open photo is in the address, so a visitor can link to one photo of the album
  • Photo details (subject to the album's Photo Details settings)
  • No login required

Making Individual Photos Public​

Besides sharing whole albums, you can make individual photos public without putting them in an album:

  1. Select one or more photos from any view
  2. Click the three-dot menu (⋮) and, under Photo Actions, choose "Make Public"

When you select photos individually, direct image links (https://your-instance/media/photos/<hash>.jpg) are copied to your clipboard so you can paste them straight away. In select all mode the photos are still made public, but no links are copied.

These are raw image-file URLs, so they behave differently from public album links. There is no album page, no custom slug, no expiration and no Photo Details toggles — anyone with the link can open the image file directly. If you need those controls, share a public album instead.

Public photos appear under the Photos tab of your Public Links page, on your public profile at https://your-instance/public/<username>, and in your own My Public Photos view.

To reverse this, select the photos again and choose "Make Private" from the same menu.

The globe button in the lightbox (shortcut P) does something different from the bulk Make Public action above: it creates a share link for that one photo and opens a dialog showing it, with a button to copy it. The link looks like https://your-instance/public/p/{slug}, where the slug is 12 random characters that belong to the share rather than to the photo. Creating a link does not make the photo public: it does not appear on your public profile or under Make Public, and the photo's own /media/... URLs still require a login.

Because the slug is random, the link can be withdrawn:

  • Replace link mints a new slug. The previous URL, and the image and video URLs behind it, stop working at once.
  • Revoke switches the share off and burns the slug, so anyone still holding that link gets a "not found" page. Sharing the photo again creates a brand-new link rather than reviving the old one.

Your active photo links are listed under the Photos tab of your Public Links page, each with its own copy, replace and revoke buttons.

What a visitor with the link can see:

  • The photo as a large preview image (not the original file). For a video, the video itself, so it can be played.
  • The photo details you allow in Settings → Public Sharing Defaults (date, location, camera, captions, people's names). Photo links have no per-link settings of their own.

What they cannot see: the original file of a photo, face thumbnails, any other photo, or anything that identifies the file's content hash. While the photo is hidden or in the trash, its link shows "not found" as well.

Expiring links and password-protected links are not available for photo shares yet.

caution

Making a photo private stops it from being served through the public views, but it cannot retroactively invalidate a direct link that someone has already opened or saved a copy of the image from.

Managing Your Shared Content​

Shared By Me​

Open Sharing and click the You shared tile (the pages are titled Photos you shared and Albums you shared) to see:

  • Photos tab — All photos you've shared, grouped by recipient
  • Albums tab — All albums you've shared, grouped by recipient

Shared With Me​

Open Sharing and click the Shared with you tile (the pages are titled Photos others shared and Albums others shared) to see:

  • Photos tab — Photos others have shared with you, grouped by sender
  • Albums tab — Albums others have shared with you, grouped by sender

Leaving an album shared with you​

An album someone shared with you stays in your list until you leave it. Open the ⋮ on the album's cover under Albums others shared, or the ⋮ (Album actions) at the right of the album page's header, and choose Leave album. LibrePhotos asks first; after you confirm, the album and its photos are no longer shown to you under Sharing, and on the mobile app it disappears at the next sync.

Only you leave: the owner keeps the album, it stays shared with everyone else, and the owner no longer sees you under Albums you shared for it. They can share it with you again at any time. You cannot leave an album you own; delete it or stop sharing it instead.

Not released yet: up to 1.3.0, only the owner could take an album off your list, by unsharing it.

Open Sharing and click the Public Links tile to see everything you've made publicly accessible. It has two tabs: Albums (albums with a public link) and Photos (individual photos you've marked public).

The Public Links row on the Sharing page shows your latest public photos and counts all of them.

Not released yet: up to 1.3.0, public photos rarely showed or counted on the Sharing page or the Photos tab, and the Photos tab also listed other users' public photos.

Public User Profiles​

Users can make their profile publicly accessible by enabling Public Sharing in their profile settings. Other users on the instance can then find them in the Public photos section of the Sharing page, which lists every user with public sharing enabled along with their public photo count. A user's public photos are browsable at https://your-instance/public/<username>.