[MEGATHREAD] Workflow feature request collection

[Vogeluff]

I have searched the existing feature requests, both open and closed, to make sure this is not a duplicate request.

• Yes

The feature

I thought it would be a good idea to have a topic for all feature requests regarding workflows, as i assume there will be many ideas by many people with lots of possible duplicates. when i tested around with it there were so many ideas immediatly in my mind, which speaks to the potential of the feature in general i assume.

Platform

• Server
• Web
• Mobile

[Vogeluff]

My feature requests for workflows so far (i assume many are already in the works or atleast in the devs mind haha):

• add dynamic naming of a created/added to album based on filename with regex matching the same way its done in filename filterin
• add a scheduled trigger with some presets and manually adjuastable timing
• add the ability for one workflow to trigger another one
• add the ability for multiple triggers in one workflow (right now u have to create the same workflow twice to have all available triggers)
• tagging as a step (preferably also with the same dynamic regex from filename then mentioned before)
• person detection as a trigger
• change timestamp and other metadata as steps

[JasonHorkles]

Idk if it would be better as a workflow or an entirely separate feature but getting granular with the person detection as a trigger would be super nice to, say, automatically add certain faces to certain albums. It's the main feature I'm missing from Immich before I dig deeper in migrating my library

[vipenm]

@JasonHorkles

In the meantime, have you tried something like this https://github.com/alangrainger/immich-person-to-album

[JasonHorkles]

That's handy, thanks @vipenm! Immich doesn't recognize pets though right? That would be my biggest use case, since I have an album for my dogs that get auto added to it

[multi-suggester]

The ideas that comes to my mind is

• for cosmetic itd be nice if filters in the workflow steps were grouped rather then alphabethical imo

• auto sorting filters to top automatically in the workflow view in general (not sure if it exist or not)

• pinning or hiding some steps in steps list

• maybe changing the word "then" to "do" ? in workflow summary unless there is a reason

• perhaps the filters or steps can be generalized with a structure in the image below ?
  (its code.org building blocks basiccaly and i thought similiarish approach may be applied perhaps or not?)
  https://www.epanorama.net/newepa/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Screenshot-2014-09-14-19.44.49.png

filter by xxx of xxx of xxx sorta?(filter by counts of tags? , filter by xxx tag? ..... , provides default modifiable blocks?)
do xxx

also perhaps for creation of steps vaiables like in api might be used perhaps?(i never used api but i feel like it can be a fast source of inspiration for potential steps or may provide a different appoach? as modifiable blocks but like i said i didnt used apis)

[multi-suggester]

also i have a feeling that we will need a way to seperate pre designed steps and custom steps for non tech savvie peoples perhaps

[isZYKerman]

#29108
#29110

[r3moob]

Feature request:

• Add support for filtering by EXIF metadata.

Example use case:

• Add support for filtering by the full file path. This would be particularly useful for external libraries, allowing files to be automatically archived, moved to locked folders, or otherwise organized based on their directory structure.

• Extend the Album action to support creating albums from file path patterns. For example:

[jonvdveen]

Yes! And because I'm not quite sure whether these things are included in EXIF metadata, I'll add:

• Tags
• Resolution (great for finding low quality images)
• Duration (helps in locating and deleting 1 second videos)

[multi-suggester]

i think the sub elements in general view can be more good looking by saying something like

"if rating is bigger then 3 then" sorta thing perhaps? , its just cosmetic tho

[r3moob]

In general, workflows could be very powerful and useful, especially with external libraries. It would also be great to have the ability to filter by any metadata, not just the metadata stored or processed by Immich. I think storing all file metadata in a JSON field and exposing it to workflows would provide a lot of flexibility.

Additionally, supporting inputs and outputs for workflow functions could unlock many more use cases. However, implementing that would likely require a significant rework of the current plugin architecture.

[SmoochSmackers]

I have been waiting for workflows since I spun up my Immich server before immich was officially released. I desperately want the ability to move photos/videos to an archived album, filtered by the exif data, specifically via the presence, or lack there of, of the camera model field. This way I can finally have my personally shot media separated from images/short videos I've downloaded from the internet and finally have my timeline/roll cleared of screenshots, etc.!

[SmoochSmackers]

Please implement a way for workflows to perform an action based on whether an EXIF property exists.

I want to be able to automatically separate the photos/videos that I take myself from those which I've downloaded from the internet so that my screenshots or random cute animal videos won't show up on my general library timeline. I plan to do this by adding to an album, and archiving, all those files whose camera "model" EXIF property is empty/not present.

I've been periodically in here requesting some way to separate downloaded media for years at this point, so apologies for the pestering, but we're so close to realizing this, it hurts!

Maybe there is already some way to get this working as is, if so please let me know, but I think that this line of code makes it impossible to match a null EXIF match, and as far as I know, there is no way, currently, to do something like "inverse" a regex match for "^$". Actually I don't think that such an inversion would even help because as soon as that "null" status of the property itself is detected, the workflow is instantly shutdown.

Please correct me if I'm mistaken and there is, in fact, already a way to get this working.

[nitwitt10]

• Filter by File Path
• Add Tag(s)

[laundmo]

I would love a way in the workflow to get external data back and integrate it into the metadata, like tags/description for example. I suppose this could be done using an external tool that updates things through the API, but having a built in 'get web request and write results to field' step could make sense. Perhaps with jq-like json paths to make it useable with APIs

[laundmo]

Another more power-user workflow step idea would be scripting. This would allow powerusers to create complex behaviour without needing to add tons of complex workflow steps.

[bo0tzz]

Full third-party workflow steps through https://extism.org/ will be available eventually

[Vogeluff]

another idea would be to have settings to share your workflows with other users on your istance. for example just having a toggle "share with other users" or something similar.

related but not sure about how realistic: admins could have a toggle "activate for every user"

[Eskuero]

• Trigger: cron format scheduling
• Filter: by upload date with relative values supported
• Action: Move to trash

My usecase is some family members download a shitton of Tiktok to share via other apps and the tiktok app saves them to the Camera folder. Which means they get uploaded via immich and clutter their timeline.

Thankfully they all get saved with some hex string that matches [a-z0-9]{32}.mp4

But ideally I would not want to delete them immediately after upload so as not to remove it from their phones so what I kinda want to do is

• Trigger: Daily schedule
• Filter 1: Filename matching [a-z0-9]{32}.mp4
• Filter 2: Uploaded more than a week ago
• Action: Move to trash

[TDuffinNTU]

Could be nice to blacklist them so they're accessible locally but not on Immich. That's a bit more work tho and could result in some unintended data loss if you assumed all pics are backed up.

[Eskuero]

@TDuffinNTU I asked for something similar like that on #26735 with the same usecase on mind.

[Eskuero]

Another interesting thing would be ability to do dry-runs so we could test what files are passing the filters before enabling the workflow

[sonalys]

I would love to be able to filter either by a positive or negative match on a CLIP query.
This would allow people to add or not add new assets on workflows with more complex behavior like:

• Add all photos containing black cats over a match threshold to an album
• Do not add photos containing screenshots to this album

My thought is that the closer to the existing search bar functionality, the better.
So, not limited to:

• CLIP Search
• OCR

[leleogere]

The main issue is that depending on the request, you can get very different similarities. For instance, a threshold at 0.8 could work to get all images of "sunset at the beach", but could be too loose for "cat", or too strict for another request (I made up the numbers, I havn't tried it). One thing that is possible (and you mentioned it) is to expose a similarity threshold, and let the user set it themselves (with some form of preview likely so that you can try to tune it live).

About the link you sent, this is for classification: you have a fixed number $n$ of classes, and you want to categorize an image into one of those class. You can simply choose the class the most similar to the image/text you want to classify. I'm not sure to see how it is relevant here. You could eventually set the two classes to ["black cat"] vs ["not a black cat"], but this likely won't work. I suspect the embedding of those two queries to be actually very close (try to search in immich "not a black cat", you'll be surprised!).

[wndenis]

But it is still possible to define an arbitrary distance/square distance/confidence/matching probability threshold!
Yet it is up to user to find the best working threshold for their case, as in face search

For text it can be

[1] FILTER . Filter by CLIP distance (text)
queryText = "query text"
maxDistance = 0.35

And another one for image

[1] FILTER . Filter by CLIP distance (image)
queryImage = "image uuid"
maxDistance = 0.35

It can reuse most of the existing searchSmart

immich/server/src/repositories/search.repository.ts

Lines 281 to 297 in 237734b

	searchSmart(pagination: SearchPaginationOptions, options: SmartSearchOptions) {
	if (!z.int().min(1).max(1000).safeParse(pagination.size).success) {
	throw new Error(`Invalid value for 'size': ${pagination.size}`);
	}
	return this.db.transaction().execute(async (trx) => {
	await sql`set local vchordrq.probes = ${sql.lit(probes[VectorIndex.Clip])}`.execute(trx);
	const items = await searchAssetBuilder(trx, options)
	.selectAll('asset')
	.innerJoin('smart_search', 'asset.id', 'smart_search.assetId')
	.orderBy(sql`smart_search.embedding <=> ${options.embedding}`)
	.limit(pagination.size + 1)
	.offset((pagination.page - 1) * pagination.size)
	.execute();
	return paginationHelper(items, pagination.size);
	});
	}

It will require additional filtering for the distance like:

    .where(sql`smart_search.embedding <=> ${options.embedding}`, '<', threshold)

---

Moreover, it could theoretically accept a list of queries and use the average embedding, computed as the mean of their embeddings.
For example, instead of the broad query pet we could specify pet+cat+dog+cheetah if we have a pet cheetah, increasing the probability that our home cheetah is classified as a pet
Similarly, instead of the broad query document we could usedocument+driver's license+Utility bill+Receipt+Invoice+Birth certificate to make the embedding more representative of common document types.

As an extra additional advanced improvement, it could also accept a list of negative queries so that the final embedding looks like

$$\text{embedding} = \text{avg}([q_1, q_2, q_3,\ldots, q_n]) - \text{avg}([nq_1,\ldots, nq_n])$$

This gives finer-grained control over which contexts we want to target and which we want to push away from

upd¹

Footnotes

1. Added formatting and a description of the average embedding over multiple terms. Sorry for the edits. ↩

[sonalys]

I believe that having a live preview and allowing the user to experiment with the threshold would be useful enough.
If I say I want to filter black cat photos, and have a preview of all my existing photos for a given threshold, I could decide by analyzing the lowest score matching photos, as long as there are black cats in the lower boundary it would be a good enough threshold for a match.

[wndenis]

I hope this idea gets a bit more attention. I believe many users, myself included, would benefit from it.
Even a partial implementation would already be a great improvement!

[sonalys]

Update on my side: I found this project https://github.com/tedornitier/immich-pet-tagger
It works very similarly by what we have discussed here, using positive and negative sampling to tag pets.

[kvalev]

1. It should be possible to easily (even automatically) "inverse" the whole workflow. For example if I have a workflow that puts assets with a certain tag in an album, if the asset gets untagged, then it should be automatically removed from the album. Currently I think you have to have two workflows which is very annoying.

2. Once a workflow is created (but also later on), it should run on all relevant assets.

3. There should be workflow based on detected person (both detected by ML, as well as manually tagged).

4. The metadata update trigger should work on every metadata change - both after extracted from exif, as well as manually updated (e.g. via the geolocation utility)

[multi-suggester]

i think 2 should be an option (am not sure if it would create a problem and cant think of one atm but i feel like there might be cases it can cause problems)

[hunnguye]

Yes to detected people. Maybe as some kind of filter where it only selects photos which have an overlap of selected people.

I feel like there could be synergy with this feature request #10373

My use case (like in the above discussion) would be tagging family photos which contain exactly only the selected people not more or less. Though what the resulting set should contain could also be subject to discussion.

[Vogeluff]

ability to have forks in automations to basically combine multiple ones in bigger complexer ones. if then else etc basically

[tgf9]

I take tons of junk photos when I need to remember something, like where I parked my car. It would be great if workflows could help me find and delete all of those images. Maybe a person detection trigger? Or rather lack of person trigger?

if no person in image:
  delete image after 24 hours

or maybe

if no person in image:
  move to junk album

[Neuffexx]

Some ideas I had would be to allow a workflow to add Tag's to an image of people it identified via the Face Recognition feature, as well as moving them to folders based on it. So to essentially create a dynamic library of people you have fotos of / with.

That said, group photos might be a problem, but I feel like if you are able to add logic like like someone suggested above, then it should be able to filter out based on number of people in image or ignore certain people (i.e. yourself).

To that end some potential additions to workflows:

• Trigger: Face Recognition
• Trigger: Manual (if you have a list of active / saved workflows a button to run that specific one similar to Jobs)
• Action: Add Tag
• Filter: By Tag
• Filter: By Face

[Neuffexx]

To be honest it might even work with CLIP (I have no real idea of how it works tbh) to cluster photos by content categorizations. Though maybe you need to have some QC via something like a threshold on similarity of results to search?

[potat-dev]

a button to manually run specific workflow

Highly upvote!

[Prit8]

Hi all,

First of all, thank you for the amazing work on Immich.

I use Immich as a private family photo platform behind Cloudflare Tunnel and Cloudflare Access.

Each family member has their own account and only has access to specific shared albums.

Currently, shared users have more permissions than I would like to grant.
I hope my request is not a redondant demand , I have search and and I don't find anything

Describe the solution you'd like

It would be very useful to have more granular permissions on a per-user or per-album basis, for example:

• Allow viewing only
• Disable photo/video downloads
• Disable comments
• Disable likes/reactions
• Disable sharing of albums
• Read-only mode for shared albums
• Ad user as administrator on a shared albums without put the user as administrator on immich

Why is this useful?

In my case, family members don't need to interact with the content.

They only need to browse photos that I choose to share.

The goal is not to restrict trusted users, but to better protect personal data while providing a simple viewing experience.

This would also make Immich more suitable for family deployments and self-hosted environments where the administrator wants tighter control over shared content.

Thank you for considering this feature.

[Rotaryracer]

Seems to be workflow, so I'm going to add this one here:

#4282

Currently, Immich backing up photos from mobile devices to the server essentially is just mirroring what you have on the device. If you delete a photo in the web browser, it moves to Trash, Immich thinks it's never been uploaded, and uploads it again. This has been confirmed as a trivial request by one of the maintainers, and a vibe-coded fork has even been completed, but we need someone to take it over the finish line.

This has been an ongoing request for nearly three years. I don't see this so much as a requested "feature" (i.e. nice to have) as a "holy heck, how has this not been fixed by now".

[Eskuero]

Under "Advanced" settings in the Android app there's a "Sync remote deletions [EXPERIMENTAL]" that seems to work somewhat decently. Although is not foolproof yet.

[dwnsdp]

I would love to use this feature to check the timestamp of uploaded images and if they match another image in my library, then put them in a stack together. I don't see a way to do this currently.

[LadnerJamie]

• I would like to see the ability to monitor when a file is added to Immich via the external library and have a workflow process that file.

[fabianbees]

Like many other users, I organize my photos in an external library using a directory structure like this:

/external-lib/
├── 2025
│   └── 12-23 - Christmas
│       ├── img1.jpg
│       └── img2.jpg
└── 2026
    ├── 04-22 - Trip to Lake
    │   ├── 3.jpg
    │   └── 7.jpg
    └── 06-13 - Visit of Museum
        ├── 4.jpg
        └── 5.jpg

In other words, each event lives in a folder like:

/external-lib/YYYY/MM-DD - Album Name

One workflow use case I'd really like to support is treating this folder structure as the source of truth for albums (similar to #4279).

My idea would be something like:

1. Workflow trigger: External library asset path changed (new asset, moved asset, renamed folder, etc.)
2. Regex/path extraction: Match the path (e.g. /external-lib/\d{4}/\d{2}-\d{2} - (.+)/) and expose capture groups as workflow variables, so the album name (Christmas, Trip to Lake, ...) can be reused in later steps.
3. Album action: Create the album if it doesn't exist and add the asset to the album named from the captured variable.
4. (Optional) Mark the album as read-only or workflow-managed so manual edits don't conflict with the external library.

The nice part is that moving an image between folders would naturally move it between albums as well, since the external library remains the single source of truth.

The only piece I'm not sure about is cleanup. If an event folder is renamed or deleted, the corresponding album could become stale or empty. Maybe this could be handled by another trigger (folder deleted/renamed), or by introducing the concept of workflow-managed albums that can automatically be renamed or removed when their backing folder changes.

I don't know if this is the intended direction for workflows, but it feels like a good fit and would solve a fairly common external-library use case without introducing a dedicated "Smart-Albums" feature.

[GerardUmbert]

how about having triggers for AI stuff?

Lets assume i wanna create albums for "cats" or "dogs" or "cars", or having tings archived depending on OCR results, for example, restaurant tickets that always contain the same wordings or "documents with my passport or national ID number" and things like that?

[git-commit-amen]

Agreed. Even something as simple as 'After OCR runs on an image, add it to this album if it contains this word'. Would be perfect for organising documents or screenshots.

[GerardUmbert]

yes, pottentially even sort screenshots by type of app or stuff like that, even by content would be easy way to group images to delete and free up space and stuff like that.

Ideally there could be something to run "once a month get all images older than X weeks in Y album and remove them" so you have some time to take it off an album to keep it sale else, automatic cleanup of crap stuff

[deebloo]

It would be great if we could attach a workflow to a shared folder. For example, once work flows support facial recognition, my wife and I will both have to setup a workflow to auto add our kids. On Google photos it's a feature of the shared folder itself. It would be cool if a folder could have workflows attached and when you share it with someone it asks if you want to use that workflow.

[adamkovacs2000]

My request would be to pass variables (regex capture groups) between workfllow stages.
For example with the new path/filename regex matcher it could be possible to create capture groups and create albums based on them.
Like the path in the external folder is.../images/holidays/2020 Italy/imagename --->>> Then create an album named "2020 Italy" and add the asset.
The only missing piece to this workflow is the ability to pass capture groups strings as variables.

[AlphaHasher]

It would be great to have a feature to trigger a workflow on media that is uploaded to an album. I have a meme folder where I drop images/videos that I don't necessarily want to show up in the timeline. The solution is to archive media that is uploaded to this album, however this does not exist to my knowledge. EXIF metadata matching does not work since there is no metadata in the files and there is no consistent naming scheme.

[itsvyle]

that would be awesome: I'd like to use this to archive photos downloaded from WhatsApp (I use an iPhone)
on upload they get put into a certain album by the "Sync Albums" feature, and being able to catch that with a filter would be quite nice

[akaiprogrammer]

it would be great to have a filter for assets without geolocation, so that those assets can be added into a separate folder, and one can go through them and add geolocation information.

[scottnrx]

Yes please! Also triggers based on metadata (like location added, location removed, person added, etc.)

[S1146468]

Workflow action to rename asset filenames using metadata templates

Summary

Add a workflow action that can rename an asset's filename based on its metadata.

This should be separate from Storage Templates. Storage Templates control the physical storage path, while this workflow action should update the filename Immich displays for the asset and uses for downloads.

Example templates

Snapchat_{{takenAt:yyyyMMdd_HHmmss}}_{{sequence}}.{{extension}}

WhatsApp_{{takenAt:yyyyMMdd_HHmmss}}_{{sequence}}.{{extension}}

Camera_{{make}}_{{model}}_{{takenAt:yyyyMMdd_HHmmss}}.{{extension}}

Suggested template variables

The rename action could support metadata fields such as:

• Capture date and time
• File extension
• Asset type
• Camera make and model
• Lens
• Existing filename
• Album
• Tags
• Country, region, or city when available
• Asset ID or a short unique suffix

More examples

{{make}}_{{model}}_{{takenAt:yyyyMMdd_HHmmss}}.{{extension}}

{{country}}_{{takenAt:yyyyMMdd_HHmmss}}_{{assetIdShort}}.{{extension}}

{{album}}_{{takenAt:yyyy-MM-dd_HH-mm-ss}}.{{extension}}

Important capabilities

• Preview or dry-run mode
• Collision handling
• Automatic extension preservation
• Support for existing assets
• Filters by album, tag, filename regex, source, device, or media type
• Fallback values when metadata is missing
• Option to update the displayed/download filename without changing the physical storage path

Use cases

This would be useful for normalizing filenames from:

• Snapchat
• WhatsApp
• Phone cameras
• Digital cameras
• Scanners
• Photo exports
• Other import tools that create inconsistent or meaningless filenames

The goal is a generic workflow step:

Rename filename from metadata template

[GerardUmbert]

Regarding Location based albums...

I'd love to be able to do

"whatever IS NOT < COUNTRY >" -> move to album_name -> album_name == < COUNTRY >< PICTURE_TAKEN_YEAR >

This way, we could prevent a random photo in our countries to be added as an album but ANYWHERE else in the world would automatically create its own album

[eddified]

Let's talk about usability. When working with filters in a workflow, it can become difficult to test the filters: are they catching what I expect them to catch? Is my regex correct? Do the photos have the EXIF tag I want to filter on?

A 'test' tool could be very helpful here. Ex: I create a filter on EXIF, add my regex, then click "view photos that would match this filter" to see if I got the expected EXIF property & my regex works.

[eddified]

Along with this: once a workflow is created, users will probably want to run them (everything after the "trigger" part) on existing photos without having to run the trigger. Ex: I've created a workflow that runs against new assets (trigger on asset upload), but I want to have it apply to assets I uploaded in the past. Two things that can help with this:

1. run against all photos in a library: in jobs page, put option to run a workflow against all photos in a library (skips the trigger step, obviously)
2. run on an individual photo: on a specific photo, one of the options can be "run against a workflow..." and a dialog pops up asking the user to select which workflow to run against that asset (skips the trigger step, obviously).

[r3df0chs]

Request: Auto Tag Pictures during upload from phones, based on phone folder location

At the moment i backup my Camera Folder on my phone.
Sometimes i think about to also Backup folders from other apps or screenshots, but i do not do this as this would end in and mess in Immich.

I though about it, if we could tag images based on the folder during upload it would be awesome.
For example, Screenshots Folder -> Tag is as "Screenshot", MessagingApp as -> "Messaging" and so on

[rod2k]

Hi, I would like to suggest my workflow:

1. Trigger: Manual (button "Close Event") - (after all the editors shared the images inside the album)
2. Filter: Album is shared = true
3. Action: Copy assets to /external/events/{album-name}/
4. Action: Delete original album
5. Action: Scan external library

Why?, because at some point I would like to sync my External Library (basically a central folder in my shared storage at home) to another cloud solution, like OneDrive, Dropbox, AWS, etc for external and automated backup, and it's easier for my not-so-techy family to look into the storage to locate a particular event.