Confused about visitor access and albums

[bythelake9428]

I'm truly confused about the multi-user features and may need to re-think my plans for Photoprism.

I'm a Photoprism Plus user today, and I'd like to make my Photoprism instance accessible (read-only) to the public, without requiring a log-in.

I see that there are both Guest and Visitor roles, but the descriptions state that each can view resources "that have been shared with them". I have no albums defined today, and didn't intend on creating albums, as I want my whole photo archive to be accessible to the public.

My question is this: Is there a way for me to share my Photoprism instance publically, without requiring authentication, where visitors can search my entire photo collection instead of a specific album?

[graciousgrey]

This sounds very similar to this feature request (which is not yet implemented)

• Sharing: Public Image Wall #669

At the moment you could use either the viewer role (however this requires a login)

https://docs.photoprism.app/user-guide/users/#viewer

or album sharing links

https://docs.photoprism.app/user-guide/share/

[bythelake9428]

Thanks for taking the time to reply. Truly appreciated.

Seems like true public, anonymous access isn't happening anytime soon. Visitor access requires a login, and the feature request you pointed out from 2020 hasn't been assigned. I already have an online photo archive, but I wanted to expose Photoprism for its search capability.

I also simply wanted to share all 37,000 photos via the search. It seems that Photoprism's sharing capability is via an Album, which would require that I add all 37,000 photos to an Album, then add new pictures to the album every time I add photos to my archive. As the admin, I can search the whole collection without having an album defined, and I was hoping to share the same with the public.

I may need to re-think my public photo search strategy.