[Feature] Ability to hide albums from the timeline.

[rollermy]

The feature

I would like to exclude some albums from showing up on the main timeline.

I have an album of random receipts. Another of store items i might wish to buy sometime. And a few others.
I want to keep these pictures and have access to them, but don't want to see them as i'm scrolling down memory lane.

Possibly a simple version of #2451 but without the complexity and privacy orientation.

Thanks!

Platform

• Server
• Web
• Mobile

[kaaku3]

Yes I want this. I still want to back them up just excluded from the timeline.
Perhaps as an option to exclude local albums from timeline or add local album to archive folder.

[bcsteeve]

The obvious solution is to use the archive feature.

BUT... the problem with archive, in this use-case, is that they then get mixed in with all the archived items and you can't un-archive from within the album. Hmm... I think that might be the solution. Add the ability to unarchive archived items from within the album view. I feel like that might already be in the works?

[stephen304]

I think the main problem with using archiving is that it makes organizing photos into the album a 2 step process.

For example I have a memes album - I don't want my memes to clutter up my timeline so I have to add the meme to the album then archive it. If I change my mind about a photo, I have to open the image and first unarchive it, then remove it from the album. If I remove it from the album before unarchiving it, then it disappears and I need to hunt down the image in the archive so I can unarchive it.

It would be better if the "archive" status could be applied to the album so that adding / removing assets to/from the album automatically archives or unarchives it (and of course handles edge cases, like if an asset is in multiple "archived" albums then removing from one would skip unarchiving it since it's still in another archived album). That way, organizing receipts and memes into albums can be as simple as marking those albums as archived and adding stuff to them.

[bkbilly]

There is also another issue with Archive. These images won't show on People tab.

[OnlyC0RE]

Any ETA on this feature? Is this being / will this be worked on?

[bo0tzz]

We don't give ETAs. If a feature is being worked on, the pull request will be linked in the FR thread.

[arifroni]

I would also want this feature. Archiving is not an ideal solution tbh.
I have screenshot folder/album, which i dont want in my timeline, just like google photos. I dont want to go to the album and archive it everytime i take a new screenshot!

[shortringbear]

Thank you! Right now I'm still holding off on syncing most of my photos to immich, because it would mess up my timeline. So it's basically just my /camera folder right now. The moment this feature gets introduced I would use Immich to manage all my photos, since then I could finally add stuff that I don't want on the timeline :)

[Actpohomoc]

Fully support this feature request

[wrkealey]

This is the one missing feature I desperately want.

I have a lot of pictures I take around the house for various projects and maintenance stuff I have to do. A lot of it is pictures of model numbers, measurements, or whatnot. Just so I can easily look that stuff up later. And Immich lets me just instantly have a glance at those pictures anywhere, from any device. But its off-putting when family photos get interrupted by 3 shots of a microwave magnatron I need to replace, or an oddly shaped hole in the ceiling.

[michaelreiners]

I second this feature. Would be really helpful. In my case I would host photos of other people. But I don't want them im my personal feed.

I imagine something like this in the album options:

[shortringbear]

This looks really good! Though I'd prefer to also have that option in the timeline tab itself, to simply toggle on or off albums.

[l-mb]

Yes, an "Exclude from Timeline" setting for an album (or individual photo) is what I'd be looking for too.

"Archive" isn't exactly the thing (and doesn't work per album), and most definitely isn't what users will look for.

[MergenStudios]

I would also really like this feature. It would really help with saving all my images to immich, as I do want to save screenshots etc., but I dont want them cluttering my main timeline, which is just for normal photos from my phone or camera

[TheToto]

I have a workarround for this. It's a bit ugly but it works.

Share your album by link, and allow upload. Open a private navigation window and upload photos to the album. You're not the owner of the pictures so you can view them in album view, but not in your timeline.

[Untimed4598]

This is an interesting workaround actually, might work out for many cases. Quick question though in case you're already doing this, do the photos added this way still run the face recognition? Like let's if I upload some of my own photos in there and then search using my face will it show up?

[DrD4ffy]

I could imagine that a per-album setting to hide the photos in the timeline would be helpful for everybody. A default setting could be defined in the user profile. This would cover:
1.) Users who see the timeline as an unorganised stream of photos they never touch. Nice things that should be highlighted will be placed in albums for a nice presentation. (default: don't hide)
2.) Users who see the timeline as a bunch of 'not yet sorted" photos. All sorted photos (assigned to albums) will be systematically hidden in the timeline. (default: hide)
3.) Users in between, who organise nice moments in albums without wanting to hide them in the timeline, (default: hide) but want to create some albums like 'screenshots', 'wallpapers', 'bills' ... with photos that are no longer shown in the timeline (album setting: hide)

[l-mb]

Or those who want different things at different times.

There's photos I really don't need to be reminded off that I still want to keep (even in my timeline, but not the "x years ago"), and others that I never want to see in my timeline, and thus that I may want to hide temporarily as "confidential" when I'm looking through my timeline with others, from the medical to personal.

I think those are fairly common needs/use cases.

[bgr]

My workaround for the "screenshots" use case:

1. created a new user "Screenshots"
2. created a new External Library and assigned it to the newly created user
3. uploaded screenshots to the network share
4. logged into new user, went to Account Settings > Partner Sharing
5. shared with my main account

the shared pictures are hidden by default from my main user's timeline, they can be accessed via "Sharing" menu in the sidebar.

[Tre916]

That would be maddening. And defeat the purpose of automatic sync.

[Doomnometron]

Are people in the "workaround photos" recognized and added to the people overview of the main account?

[bgr]

Are people in the "workaround photos" recognized and added to the people overview of the main account?

No, it says "Asset has unassigned faces" and there's an option to assign a person to the face manually.

[l-mb]

I think discussing workarounds is not really constructive. It's clear that Immich can't do it today, and workarounds don't/can't have sufficiently good UX to drop the feature request.

[bgr]

Nobody is asking for dropping the feature request. Workarounds provide a way to do something until the proper way to do it is available. People are coming to this page by googling, and it's useful to discuss what's possible, and what the limitations are. The discussion also provides useful insight to the maintainers as it provides insight on how people want to use the app, and how important it is to them compared to other issues.

[daltimus11]

I agree and I think this is an important feature to have separate from locked photos.

I also want to be able to hide albums such as screenshots & downloads from the timeline view, yet still sync them automatically.

[RBEGamer]

Fully support this feature request, too! And for me there is one other advantage: Archive function don't move the archived images into a separate folder in the library and can't be separated from the other images on the file system, if im using the templating feature.

[sysardex]

The best solution is to allow the ability to remove specific albums from the timeline. I understand that this is likely not easy, but it's a major issue. Most people mix technical photos with regular ones.

[bgr]

I have a vibecoded version of it on my fork (branch hide-album-from-timeline) if anyone feels like building it by themselves and giving it a try.

[bcsteeve]

How do you deal with a situation where a photo is both in hidden and non hidden albums?

[sysardex]

The priority of the ban needs to be raised.

[SirBoomBoom]

Commenting in the hopes of this coming back, have loads of pictures on my phone that I cannot backup to Immich because I'm unwilling to flood the timeline I share with my family with the thousands of jobsite photos I have to take and preserve for months at a time.

Would prefer it so much to be able to just mark the different albums so I could back them up to my server without having them completely ruin the timeline, instead of needing to split where some folder get backed up with Immich while others have to use Google.

[ReneDyhr]

I'm a photographer with 10,000+ images from client sessions and gigs that I currently manage through Google Photos. This feature is the last thing keeping me from fully migrating to Immich — without it, all those client photos would flood my personal timeline.
Would love to see this prioritised!

[alextran1502]

Hello everybody, just another quick update here on this feature request.

Workflow is close to wrap-up, and for that reason, the feature will likely be implemented through that means.

What I have envisioned for this to work is that.

• There will be a premade workflow that "adds assets to this album will automatically archive it."
• From the album option, you can choose this workflow for the album you want to use to hide images from the timeline, along with other workflows.
• There are still some thoughts on if/how to backfill a certain workflow.

Thanks,
Alex

[NextBlaubeere]

Hello everybody, just another quick update here on this feature request.

Workflow is close to wrap-up, and for that reason, the feature will likely be implemented through that means.

What I have envisioned for this to work is that.

* There will be a premade workflow that "adds assets to this album will automatically archive it."

* From the album option, you can choose this workflow for the album you want to use to hide images from the timeline, along with other workflows.

* There are still some thoughts on if/how to backfill a certain workflow.

Thanks, Alex

ok cool, but will the archive have separate albums possible, or is the archive a messy place where all the photos live?
it is all about organization really.

[alextran1502]

it's the opposite, where on the album page, you can see which album has workflow enabled on it

[deadmeu]

Hi Alex:

• Does archiving have other side-effects like excluding them from memories or changing how they are indexed?
• What about the scenario of an asset belonging in two albums, and you have both albums set to be hidden on the timeline, but then you remove the workflow on just one of the albums. Will the shared asset still remain archived due to the first, still workflowed, album or will the workflow removal kick in and un-archive it? My expectation is that it would remain archived.
• If you have un-archived a single asset in an album with the workflow enabled, will it be re-archived automatically with future invocations of the workflow? If there's a nice image I like from WhatsApp I want to keep on my timeline it would be nice to be able to.

I still think workflows is too complicated a solution for the simple issue of "I don't want to see my WhatsApp media in my timeline". We're going to have thousands of assets archived, with more added on a daily basis. I can envision people may end up accidentally archiving assets, and now instead of being able to quickly open the Archived collection and find them, it will basically be impossible, because it doesn't seem like you can easily filter your albums to only show archived assets (if they can even remember which albums the image belonged to). People have probably manually archived specific assets over time, knowing that they can just open the Archived collection and find them there to easily un-archive them, but now that list will be polluted with so many other files it's basically going to be impossible to find all the manually archived ones. Could you at least filter the Archived collection to whether the assets were added there by a workflow or manually?

[kevinholtkamp]

I don't think using a workflow makes sense in this use case

Workflows are one time operations on things bases on conditions, which changes the images properties

Archiving based on albums is something that should be more like a filter on the timeline when loading images, but should not change the images themselves

[Rinyuu]

I appreciate all the work and that there is being listened to feedback, but Alex's proposed solution kind of sounds like a quick fix / workaround instead of just trying to implement what people have been asking for: basic organisation options and folders...

I personally won't be touching things like workflows and the archive, I just want a simple way to add pics to folders and exclude them from main.

[alextran1502]

Would you toggle a "hide from timeline" button that creates a workflow that automatically archives anything added to the album, without you having to go into the workflow interface and create this specific mechanism?

[Rinyuu]

I would! But it's kind of difficult for me to grasp where the archive comes into play: Would this mean the "hidden" pictures are at the same time archived AND also visible from within their respective folders (with "hide from timeline" toggled)?

Basically I'm just thinking of any gallery app or file manager; you can add images to folders and choose to have the folder included or excluded from the main feed, and then the archive still exists to just throw in any other pics you don't need but also don't want to delete.

Eventually also being able to make folders inside the locked album and archive would be nice, since these are also standard options that most (local) image gallery apps seem to have, but I would say this isn't a priority since it's a pretty niche use-case.

I also apologise if I was a bit too negative in my first post; I do appreciate the work and Immich a lot. Especially since I think it has the potential to be the standard of image managing (and THE golden replacement of GPhotos when people start to move away from Google even more; GrapheneOS and Motorola will kickstart this). From where I stand it's just so frustrating to see Immich is already insanely good, but gets held back by lacking basic and intuitive organisation options. To be fair Google Photo's has exactly the same issue, but Immich could be the app that is simply much better than GPhotos instead of just being an alternative!

[alextran1502]

Let me explain why we're leaning toward the workflow + archive approach rather than adding a visible flag on the album table.
If we add a per-album visibility flag, it works for the simple case. But it creates problems once workflows ship.

• Two competing ways to do the same thing: Workflows will let you auto-archive assets when they're added to an album. If we also have an album-level toggle, users will now have two mechanisms to hide things from the timeline, which will conflict with each other. "I flipped the toggle, but I also have a workflow, which one wins?" That's confusing and hard to debug, especially with shared albums and assets in multiple albums.
• People want different levels of hiding: Some of you want to hide WhatsApp photos from the timeline, but still be able to search for them and see faces in People. Some of you want receipts and screenshots gone from the search, too. Some of you want medical or personal photos hidden from Memories but still searchable. A single boolean on the album can't express any of that. Workflows with archive as the primitive can evolve what archive means per surface (search, People, Map, Memories) independently.
• Query performance: the timeline is the most impactful query in the app. An album visibility flag means every timeline scroll needs to join through the album-asset relationship table and check which albums are hidden. That's expensive at scale. Archive is a single indexed column on the asset row, visibility = 'timeline', already optimized. Workflows write that state once when you add a photo to the album, not on every read.

In short, I don’t think there is a perfect solution for everybody, given their use cases; there is a middle ground that users and developers have to meet here.

I do want to reiterate that the team is on your side, not against you, and we want the application to get better and serve more use cases. We also understand the nuances of the codebase and the performance hit that makes the experience worse in certain implementations. And a lot of it cannot be conveyed through words; you need to live in the codebase, debug it, and optimize it to fully understand what it would take for a certain feature to make it into the application.

A lot of the time, the team is depicted as not listening to the users, but like hell we fight, we discuss and try to find a working solution for most feature requests here, and to serve other users that don’t use a certain feature as well, we don’t want to pelnalty their experience when incorporating a feature that we don’t know how many users will use.

It might be just me who gets emotional, but we have received a lot of comments that “Developers don’t care about users' requests and feedback,” and it is starting to take a toll on me and others as well.

[SirBoomBoom]

As an ignorant user, I think a toggle that is creating a workflow in the background would be fine, since I don't really care how the feature is implemented, just that it is. If that helps keep different ways of doing the same thing actually be the same under the hood even better, feels like everyone wins that way :) And I like that it keeps the door open for future improvements. Toggle can continue to exist as a simple and easy binary option for non-power users/main workflow kind of thing, while some day in the future you might implement some of the other features you mentioned earlier as power-user type features that require a more complex workflow interface, which can still be available to use and modify if necessary.

…

On Mon, Mar 30, 2026 at 8:56 PM Alex ***@***.***> wrote: Would you toggle a "hide from timeline" button that creates a workflow that automatically archives anything added to the album, without you having to go into the workflow interface and create this specific mechanism? — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#5158?email_source=notifications&email_token=ADKBOT5XO2YJJVRV6JGSSRT4TM6VNA5CNFSNUABIM5UWIORPF5TWS5BNNB2WEL2ENFZWG5LTONUW63SDN5WW2ZLOOQXTCNRTHA4TCMBVUZZGKYLTN5XKOY3PNVWWK3TUUVSXMZLOOSWGM33PORSXEX3DNRUWG2Y#discussioncomment-16389105>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ADKBOTZCYJUW7XFRA3S5RC34TM6VNAVCNFSM6AAAAAA7R4FXY2VHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43URDJONRXK43TNFXW4Q3PNVWWK3TUHMYTMMZYHEYTANI> . You are receiving this because you commented.Message ID: ***@***.***>

-- ~Beau Zeau

[eigenphase]

Hi @alextran1502 first of all thank you so much for chiming in on this topic again! I really appreciate you being part of this discussion -- this thread felt already abandoned.

I understand what you are saying, there is no single good solution and at this point, adding something like this opens unintended issues somewhere else.

I will need to try the Workflows and maybe they will improve things. However, I similar slight reservations as many here. For example, being "action" based rather than "passive filter" based means things can be missed if a workflow won't run for some reason. Having all my pictures in the archive, just because I don't want to see them in the timeline sounds rigid as well. As @deadmeu asked, what are the side effects of this? Will me pictures remain fully associated with its albums etc?

I would like to bring up again what I suggested a while ago in this thread: I think the core of the issue is the timeline instead of a timeline. To me, albums are specially curated selection of pictures belonging to a specific event or something "closed". For example "Family Holiday 2025", "Christmas 2024" etc etc.
But for most of my daily use, I'd actually just like to scroll through my pictures and it would make sense if there are several collections, timelines if you will so. I see a timeline like an "automatically filtered album".
Now there could be a timeline "Family" or "Business". Such a timeline could be defined by a set of rules, for example, inclusion and exclusion of date ranges, people involved, assigned albums, locations etc. And then there would be a fixed default one, which just shows everything. It's the timeline as it currently exists. Users have the freedom to just hide this one and create their own timelines according to their own criteria.

I believe the biggest obstacle is that immich was just not designed for it and implementing this would be a major overhaul. But may I ask, apart from labor resources, is there a good reason this wouldn't work? How I said it, it would be fully backwards compatible with everything as it is right now and add timelines without any of the issues we are discussing in this thread.

[JustACasual]

Fwiw I think the workflow solution is a good one. Will solve the issue of automatically hiding an album and offer flexibility beyond that.
Looking forward to it.

Thanks for the good work!

I bought the software and encourage everyone to do so too.

[kondi06]

I'm also planning to buy Immich, but so far it doesn't meet my expectations. One of them is exactly what JustACasual wrote.

[0xskynet]

I would want to be happy with setting up "hiding WhatsApp images" from the timeline via archiving with workflows along with other albums.

However, archiving sounds more of like marking pictures / videos as "I don't want it for now but I want to keep it just in case" and also with the workflow approach, what if I want to undo it and show the whole album in the timeline?

[kevinholtkamp]

Exactly!

The image should not be changed, the timeline query should be changed, so you can undo it more easily

[ReanimationXP]

+1 Please add this. We also need Smart Albums such that we can automatically hide certain categories of items based on filters. Workflows is useful but is a separate use case. Albums are the simplest way to achieve this, and workflows could be used for Smart Album management if necessary.

[husoyo]

This is a must. Please add this.

[acubedlimited]

Yes, this would be a very useful feature.

[I-Would-Like-To-Report-A-Bug-Please]

Damn, 3 years, and still not here :(

[S1146468]

Hi is this already implemented?
I saw this message under events but I cannot see the option.
"bo0tzz Closed as resolved last year"