Does anyone know if it’s possible to achieve this? Possibly with an external service that syncs the two?
Basically, the last feature immich can’t do that google does is to share albums. Sometimes my family wants to have albums after events, and my ones live in a silo.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| VPN | Virtual Private Network |
| VPS | Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) |
| nginx | Popular HTTP server |
[Thread #34 for this comm, first seen 29th Jun 2026, 21:10] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
The immich public proxy app is built for this, you run it on your isolated public VLAN, and it displays a shared album to people while loading the images from immich.
I would be interested in the reverse: a service that regularly scrapes a list of google photos shared albums and saves the new pictures to immich.
that some like something easily scriptable, if Google photos has something even remotely resembling an api. don’t know if it does though, never used it.
Download the whole album and import every once in a while.
Immich does the duplicate-handling.
It is but it requires public internet access to the Immich instance, or everyone involved being on our VPN. Reusing someone else’s publicly facing service to share photos from a private Immich instance is a clever workaround.
Using a reverse proxy / ingress, you can configure only share links to be publicly available, while keeping the rest of immich exclusive to your private-network. Optionally combine with something like Cloudflare Tunnel if you’re worried about leaking your server’s IP.
this right here. If you have immich setup behind a reverse proxy, just route any requests that use the /share/ and /s/ (the custom link version) on the proxy manager to route to the immich instance, and have it 403 on anything else when the request is not via the vpn
Just be aware that immich uses links like share-* as well so be sure to have that trailing / to make it so only shared links and albums can be.
edit: Actually looking into this route further, it looks like immich as a whole needs more than just the /share/ and the /s/ endpoints exposed to function correctly. I will update this in a little when i figured out more on what is actually needed
update: So it seems immich will not support this style setup without quite a bit of hands on. You need to give at minimum /share/, /s/, /_app/ and /api/ in order to actually go this route. and at that point since you’ve given /api/ you’ve essentially publicly opened the instance anyway. While you can go through and individually do each endpoint. It requires access to /api/albums /api/assets and a few other endpoints, these endpoints do seem to need auth or some form of verification tho
for anyone wanting to still go through with it. You can reverse proxy it by allowing the endpoints
The nginx location regex I used for my testing(although not very read friendly) was
location ~ /(api/(server/(config|media-types|features)|shared-links/me|albums/|timeline/(bucket|buckets)|assets/)|(share|s)|_app/){
proxy_pass *immich instance*;
}
note: this was found just by basic testing using NPM on my environment, I may have missed some more specific calls especially regarding videos as I don’t really do any video photography to allow for testing.
Additional note: You may end up confusing your users with the UI though, as since lets you click on the immich banner to get to login, but everything would be blocked. You may just want to use the immich public project that was linked later in this discussion…
Afaik immich is generally safe to publicly expose. Otherwise, I’d just use http basic auth. Supported by every server and client, should be secure enough to hold off attacks in case immich’s login/auth mechanisms fail, and I don’t see a usecase where this wouldn’t work.
If you don’t have a public IP or need IPv4, get a 4€/Month VPS (cheaper than even a Pi’s energy usage I suppose) and put headscale on it.
only if immich is publicly accessible (reverse proxy to domain, etc.). If it’s on a closed network like tailscale, albums aren’t accessible from outside the network afaik
Which you can work around with: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/26796776
There is also this: https://github.com/alangrainger/immich-public-proxy
I think your immich gallery can even be private ( though the public proxy would need to be able access it ).
I have no experience with it though.
I use this, works great. Have it on a server that is publicly accessible and has access to immich. I have it on a VPS which connects to my LAN over VPN. In immich you can configure a public domain for sharing where you put the proxy domain.
Then just share as normal and the url immich gives is the proxy.
The UI you get is very basic but functional.
I don’t want this feature! I use immich to get away from Google. I don’t want any interaction or overlap with Google photos at all. Immich allows you to share albums perfectly fine. The person you share with needs to be able to access your immich. This is the same as Google, people need to be able to access Google photos to see your Google albums too.
Choice is good.
Your opinion restricts more options I might want.
OPs opinion does not restrict the freedom you require from immich.
Thus: Your argument (beyond your own setup) is invalid
Coud probably be done. Find publicly shared Immich albums -> sync to Google Photos -> share publicly -> write the public Google Photos URL to the metadata of the Immich album.
Another could be an insulated public facing Immich instance that gets publicly shared albums pushed to it, the same way as with the other scheme. No reverse access to the private Immich instance. Then if that gets hacked, only those photos leak, attacker can’t get their hands on other server data. Assuming it’s really well isolated. A public VPS would probably be best for this.
If you plan to make a diy solution, you might’ve seen one or two CLIs for uploading to Google Photos. Just FYI, you can also leverage rclone to create Google Photos albums and uploads photos/videos there.
You definitely can if you put Immich behind a reverse proxy like Caddy and open it up to the rest of the world. I also protect my instance against bots with Crowdsec. That’s how share albums with family and friends.
IMHO you should look/ask for such a feature in a google group because big g may have a business case for such a feature: it would pull back in those users who try to escape.
and that should not be an immich feature but a google one.
as a self-hoster I prefer to have control on my data; a solution to feed my data to google through a third party (that may do whatever it wants while performing the transfer) is the exact opposite of what i’m trying to achieve and would have little to no value for me.
