communication between multiple instances

[zkhan93]

I use Immich for myself, so I have an instance for my family.
I showed Immich to my friends so now they also have their instance running for their family.
now I want to share an album with my fiend.

How difficult it would be to share an album with a user in different Immich instance.
What all things we need in place so that we can have this in future?

My rough plan to make this possible is as follows

Server

we make instance A aware of instance B in the backend, so they can communicate.
get list of users from each other.

Users

we would need a way to represent remote users
i.e., User1 from Instance A who cannot login to instance B but can access an album in instanceB

End Device

From where the client should get the remote asset ?

• if from the same server in which he is logged in
  • servers will have to communicate with each other to fulfil the get remote asset request - but latency will increase
• if from instance holding the asset
  • then instance B need to respect the auth token from instance A, and serve the asset

Album

• an album can be composed of local assets and remote assets (a concept of remote asset)
• the behaviour
  • Asset1 is owned by User1 and they live in instance A
  • Asset2 is owned by User2 and they live in instance B
  • User1 Created an album with Asset1 and shared it with User2
  • UserB adds Asset2 to the album
  • from instanceA's point of view the album has 1 local asset Asset1 and 1 remote asset Asset2
  • from instanceB's point of view the album has 1 local asset Asset2 and 1 remote asset Asset1
  • remove assets can be removed from both the servers, they both will be left with their local assets only.

[bo0tzz]

Federation has been brought up before in #728, we're not planning to support it.

[zkhan93]

hmm okay! yeah I think its possible to to some extent with a script using immich-cli.