Thanks for the detailed feedback Ryan — really helpful to hear how the multi-user setup feels in practice.
Quick context on why some menu items are missing for non-admin accounts: PhotoPrism is fundamentally designed as a single shared photo library, not as a multi-tenant app. In their model, all users see all photos by default, and “non-admin” really means “delegated admin who can’t change settings” rather than “user with their own isolated library”. Their own documentation describes the regular User role as having full access to view, edit, and delete every picture and album.
PhotoPrism’s official position on per-user libraries is to run a separate PhotoPrism instance per user. From their user docs: “It is recommended to set up additional instances if you have multiple users in a family, so that everyone can manage their own files independently.” The same answer holds for their paid editions (Essentials/Plus) — those add delegated-admin features (a User Management UI, 2FA, app passwords) but do not add isolated libraries. Per-user separation within one instance is a long-standing community request (issue #98, issue #2317) that no edition currently solves.
What we did on Syncloud is bolt a multi-tenant layer on top of that single-library design: each non-admin user gets their own folder under originals/users/<username>/, and their searches are scoped to that folder. This works well for the parts of the UI that actually run as a photo search (the main browse view, Albums you create yourself, and now Favorites + Places once the next build lands).
Where it gets tricky is the rest of the menu. Calendar, Labels, the Library file browser, and so on don’t go through the same scoped search — they query global tables that aggregate data across all users’ photos. So if we just turned them on for everyone, you’d see other users’ label names or empty Calendar entries that don’t match your library. Making each of those properly isolated means modifying PhotoPrism’s core search code in ways that PhotoPrism themselves haven’t designed for, and we’d own that complexity forever across upstream version bumps.
The pragmatic path forward, which is what we’re shipping next:
- Favorites menu enabled for regular users — properly scoped to their own photos.
- Places (map view) enabled — also properly scoped.
- The other menu items (Calendar, Labels, Library) stay admin-only for now, because turning them on without proper isolation would actually be a worse user experience (confusing or leaky), not a better one.
If you’re set on having the full menu, the honest answer is that PhotoPrism’s paid editions (Essentials/Plus) don’t solve this either — they add delegated-admin features, not per-user libraries. The thing you actually want — true multi-tenancy — isn’t a product anyone in the PhotoPrism world sells today. We’re already further along that path than upstream is.
Hope that helps explain the gap. Favorites + Places should land in the next snap update.
