Immich’s second release candidate for v3.3 is out, and it carries the milestone the project has been building toward since 3.2: people sharing. Users can now share a person with other users, even one they do not own, letting those faces appear in shared assets, and a user with the right permissions can manage someone else’s person. It is the piece that turns face recognition from a private index into something a household can keep together.

People, shared

The case the notes describe is the family where one or two people do the tidying: names, merges, birthdates, on behalf of everyone else. That is what sharing opens up. People can be updated by other users where permissions allow it, and a person you do not own can show up for you in shared assets. One limit carries over from cluster groups, the sharing pools introduced in 3.2: people are only shared within a cluster group.

The rest of the candidate

Birthday memories: when a person in your library has a birthday, Immich builds a memory around it with photos from previous birthdays. On mobile, edits made in another app now stack on top of the original photo instead of sitting beside it, so the timeline keeps one entry per shot. Administrators get the OAuth claims for quota, role and preferred username synced on every login rather than at registration only, which lets an identity provider drive those values over time. Place names now come from GeoNames, the project’s answer to disputes over what a country is called. The machine learning side gets a TensorRT path for RTX cards while older GPUs keep CUDA, plus continued work on model loading and inference, and rescaled images get more accurate lighting. Smaller entries from the changed list: the activity log opens on the latest entry, maps render non-Latin scripts properly, and album editors can update a title and description.

Running the candidate

The server side is two steps: set IMMICH_VERSION=v3.3.0-rc.1 in your .env (or v3-rc to float), then docker compose pull && docker compose up -d. On mobile, the Android build rides the Play beta channel and iOS is on TestFlight. The release notes are still marked work in progress, and the shared-people interface may change before the final release.

My read

Read this one as a look at where 3.3 is going, because it is still a candidate. People sharing is the second half of the cross-account story from 3.2, and for anyone running Immich for a family it is the change most likely to alter how the library actually gets used. Back up the database and library before trying it, and leave the instance everyone uses every day on the stable release until 3.3.0 lands.

Source: the v3.3.0-rc.1 release and the draft v3.3.0 notes.