I built a Claude Code plugin to manage my Immich library through conversation

[juanatsap]

I run Immich for my family's photos — about 50k assets imported from Apple Photos, Google Takeout, and various cameras over the
years. The web UI is great for browsing, but at that scale, organizing everything by location, finding duplicates across
import sources, or figuring out which photos are missing metadata became a real chore.

So I built a plugin that lets me just ask for what I need. Here's the setup, a Barcelona photo search, and automatic travel
album creation:

Beyond what the demo shows, it also handles:

• Duplicate detection → perceptual hashing (pHash) catches re-encoded copies across Apple Photos and Google Takeout imports
  — not just exact matches
• Library health reports → audits metadata completeness, storage breakdown, and timeline gaps
• Metadata repair → fixes broken dates, missing GPS, wrong timezones using neighbor interpolation
• Storage analysis → identifies RAW+JPEG pairs, oversized videos, reclaimable space
• People reports → reads Immich's face recognition data to show unnamed clusters, co-occurrence patterns

It generates interactive HTML galleries you can open in any browser — self-contained files with embedded thumbnails, themes,
slideshow, keyboard navigation.

On privacy: the plugin runs locally on your machine and talks directly to your Immich instance via your API key. Claude
sees metadata and thumbnails to understand your requests — no full-resolution photos leave your network. The CLIP search is
performed by Immich's own ML service, not by Claude.

Requirements:

• Immich v1.90+ with an API key
• Smart Search enabled in Immich (for natural language queries — the ML service needs to be running)
• Python 3.10+
• Claude Code

git clone https://github.com/drolosoft/immich-photo-manager.git
cd immich-photo-manager
claude plugin marketplace add .
claude plugin install immich-photo-manager

What it can't do: it doesn't edit photos, doesn't run its own facial recognition (it reads what Immich's ML already
detected), and it won't delete anything without showing you exactly what it found and asking first.

GitHub: https://github.com/drolosoft/immich-photo-manager

MIT licensed. If you have a large library and try it, I'd love to hear how it handles your setup.

[ronbruins]

I just came across this post as I was looking for some claude integration. Can this also be used to analyze images from a certain album? I have an album with a bunch of assets (image / video) and want to analyze them on a per image base to extract information.

[juanatsap]

hello @ronbruins (immich-photo-manager creator here).

Now yes! I implemented it and tried exactly that on both Immich 2.7.5 and 3.1.0. What u can do is asking things like "go through my Lisbon album and tell me what's in each photo", and it will answer item by item.

Then, you can do something like "write that into the description of each photo", or "tag the ones with a receipt as expenses", or "make a new album with the ones where my kids appear".

Descriptions, tags and albums land in Immich and you see them in the web app right away. The prompts I used to test this and what came back are here: https://github.com/drolosoft/immich-photo-manager/blob/main/doc/demos/11-album-walkthrough.md

To say that I found that Immich 3.0 changed the API for third-party tools (album contents moved to a different endpoint). So I had to fix that, and I also added the people that appear in each photo to the album listing. All of it is in the version 1.5.3 of the tool, so please, use/update to that one or newer.

Two limits to know: a video only gives one frame, and pictures reach the model as thumbnails (250px, or 1440px if you ask). A local model over MCP works too.

If you want to try it, the install is a few lines, here: https://github.com/drolosoft/immich-photo-manager#quick-start (Claude Code plugin, or any MCP client via uvx). Let me know how it goes on your setup.

Thanks for the idea, and have a great day!

[ronbruins]

Right now I am using Claude desktop on MacOs and have tried many ways to get it running, but fail to do so. Do you mind if I open an issue on your github and see were I go wrong?

[juanatsap]

@ronbruins Please!. Let's tackle that. Happy to help and fix it if you have problems.

[ronbruins]

I got it working, I continued the conversation on your own github page. Think it is better suited for that :-)