Immich Folio

Turn your Immich albums into a public photography portfolio — without ever exposing your Immich server to the internet.

A self-hosted portfolio powered by Immich. It acts as a secure reverse proxy between your visitors and your private Immich instance: your Immich server stays on your local network, completely invisible to the outside world, while your albums are published as a gallery you control.

Contents

• Features
• Requirements
• Quick Start
• First-Run Setup
• Configuration
• Docker
• Admin Panel
• What's New

Guides: Gallery Configuration · Theming · Journal & Photo Essays · Admin Panel · Deployment

Features

Gallery & Layout

• Configurable hero layouts — split, fullbleed, minimal, stacked (image + thumbnail strip), typographic (text-only), or mosaic (multi-image grid)
• Hero image carousel — single image or crossfade carousel of multiple Immich assets
• Masonry photo grid — responsive layout with natural aspect ratios and configurable columns, gap, and aspect ratio
• Uniform grid mode — switch to a fixed-aspect uniform grid per-subpage or globally
• Showcase / filmstrip / editorial-flow layouts — featured hero + grid, horizontal scroll strips, or alternating full-width and paired images
• Justified rows (experimental) — every row fills the width at one shared height, aspect ratios intact, nothing cropped
• Per-subpage grid overrides — each subpage can define its own columns, gap, aspect ratio, and layout mode, and individual albums can override that again (experimental)
• Cover focal points (experimental) — decide which part of a cover survives the crop
• Fullscreen lightbox — keyboard and swipe navigation, EXIF panel, adjacent image preloading
• EXIF metadata on hover — camera body, lens, focal length, aperture, shutter speed, ISO shown directly on the grid
• ThumbHash placeholders — instant blurred previews while full images load

Masonry and showcase, both in Studio Modern — the same album, a different grid layout.

The fullscreen lightbox with the EXIF panel — camera, lens and exposure for the frame on screen.

Content & Organization

• Subpage grouping — organize albums into named collections (e.g. /japan/tokyo-2023)
• Auto-generated slugs — URL slugs derived from album names automatically
• YAML gallery config — all gallery structure defined in a single content/gallery.yaml file
• Markdown about page — content/about.md with frontmatter for portrait, name, location, and gear list, editable from the admin panel
• Journal — photo essays and travel stories at /journal, with drafts, per-entry passwords, cover images and reading times; new entries can start from a template (wedding, hiking, travel, …)
• Photo Essay mode — long-form storytelling pages alternating text with fullbleed, paired and grid image layouts, facts lists, a slice of an album, and a map with the pins you choose — typed places, or photos placed by their GPS
• Unlisted subpages (experimental) — reachable by direct link, absent from the navigation
• Subpage on/off toggle — take a page offline without deleting it
• External navigation links (experimental) — point the header at a shop, a blog, or a social profile
• Client proofing — clients favorite photos and export the selection; picks are encoded in the URL, nothing is stored server-side
• Originals delivery — per-album opt-in lets visitors download a whole album or their proofing selection as a ZIP of the originals
• Lightbox watermark — configurable overlay on fullscreen images
• Privacy-friendly analytics — cookieless view counts, no third parties, can be switched off
• Dynamic OG images — auto-generated social preview images per album

A subpage grouping several albums into one collection.

The Markdown about page and the GPS map, both generated from your Immich data.

Admin Panel

• Visual page builder — drag & drop interface to manage hero images, standalone albums, subpages, and sections
• Album picker — browse all shared Immich albums with search, see photo counts, and add them with one click
• Settings editor — configure theme, grid layout, footer, legal/impressum, SEO, image protection and the about page from a visual UI
• Visual previews everywhere — grid layout, theme, photo frame, hero style and the Google search snippet are picked from preview cards instead of text fields
• Journal Studio — split-screen block editor with a live preview of the real page; start from a template, drag blocks into order
• Essay block editor — assemble photo essays block by block without touching Markdown
• Unsaved edits survive — leave the page builder or the journal editor mid-edit, and your changes are waiting when you come back
• Diagnostics — a page that checks the Immich connection, config and security settings, and links every finding to its fix
• Photo order editor — drag & drop a hand-picked opening sequence for any album
• Favicon upload — give the site its own icon in the browser tab
• Backup manager — every save is backed up automatically; restore any of them with one click
• Live YAML sync — changes are written directly to gallery.yaml and settings.yaml with automatic backups
• Password protected — secured with its own admin password, separate from album passwords

Requirements

• Immich 3.0 or newer. Immich 3.0 changed how album assets are retrieved; earlier versions are not supported as of v0.9.0. On an older server, albums render with the correct title but no photos, and the map stays empty — the app logs a warning naming this as the likely cause.
• Node.js 20+ (or just use the Docker image)

Quick Start

git clone https://github.com/ralksta/immich-folio.git
cd immich-folio
npm install
npm run dev

Then open http://localhost:3000/install and let the setup wizard connect you to Immich — see First-Run Setup below. It needs a token from the server log, which is printed on first access.

cp .env.local.example .env.local
# Edit .env.local with your Immich server URL and API key

cp content/gallery.yaml.example content/gallery.yaml
# Edit gallery.yaml with your album UUIDs

npm run dev

Something not coming up? npm run doctor checks the configuration from the terminal — no running app and no admin password needed. See Config Doctor.

First-Run Setup

A deployment with no gallery.yaml and no Immich credentials serves a setup screen. The wizard at /install fills both in from the browser: it connects to Immich, lets you pick albums (optional — you can add them later in /admin), and names the site. Nothing is written until your credentials have been verified against your Immich server, so a typo cannot leave you with an "installed" site that loads no photos.

The wizard is gated by a one-time token printed to the server log on first access, because a fresh deployment is reachable before it has any configuration — and without the gate, whoever finds the URL first could configure it:

══════════════════════════════════════════════════════
  Immich Folio — First-run setup token
══════════════════════════════════════════════════════
  Token:  PTmUKFIdce2DwuqBG71RAExH7tVxceXX

Read it from your container logs (docker logs immich-folio, or docker compose logs lightbox — immich-folio is the container name, lightbox the service) and append it to the URL:

http://your-site/install?token=PTmUKFIdce2DwuqBG71RAExH7tVxceXX

The token is stored in content/.setup-token (mode 0600) so it survives a restart, and is deleted once setup completes. From then on /install redirects to the gallery and its API routes refuse to run again.

The wizard writes gallery.yaml, settings.yaml and content/install.json — the last of which holds your Immich API key. Environment variables override everything in it, so credentials can be rotated without touching the file, and setting them all up front means the wizard never appears at all.

→ What the wizard writes, and environment precedence

Configuration

Environment Variables (.env.local)

# Required
IMMICH_API_URL=http://your-immich-server:2283
IMMICH_API_KEY=your-api-key

# Optional
SITE_TITLE=My Photography            # default: "Gallery"
SITE_SUBTITLE=A visual journal        # default: empty
CACHE_TTL=300                          # seconds, default: 300
STALE_MAX_AGE=86400                    # seconds an expired cache entry survives during an outage, default: 86400 (24h), 0 disables
IMMICH_TIMEOUT_MS=15000                # Immich response wait, default: 15000
IMAGE_CACHE_VERSION=1                  # bump to bust browser image caches, default: off
RATE_LIMIT_RPM=1500                    # requests/min/IP for images, default: 1500
AUTH_SECRET=long-random-string        # required in production
TRUSTED_PROXY_HOPS=1                   # reverse proxies in front, default: 0
ADMIN_PASSWORD=your-secure-password   # enables /admin panel
WEBHOOK_SECRET=long-random-string     # enables POST /api/webhook cache invalidation

Login and setup endpoints have their own, much lower limits that RATE_LIMIT_RPM does not raise — see Rate Limiting.

Behind a reverse proxy, set TRUSTED_PROXY_HOPS to the number of proxies in front of the app (nginx/Traefik/Caddy = 1; Cloudflare in front of nginx = 2). Without it the client IP is read from a header the client itself can set, which defeats the brute-force limits on the password endpoints. See Trusted Proxies.

Immich API Key Permissions

Create a dedicated API key in Immich under Account Settings → API Keys. Immich Folio only needs read access — it never modifies your library.

No write permissions needed. album.create, asset.upload, asset.delete, etc. can all be left off.

Tip (Admin Panel): The Admin Panel also uses POST /search/metadata to browse your full library for the hero image picker. This is covered by asset.read — no additional permission required.

Gallery Config

All gallery structure — hero images, albums, subpages, grid layout, footer — is defined in content/gallery.yaml.

→ Gallery Configuration Guide

Journal & Photo Essays

Long-form storytelling with fullbleed photos, side-by-side pairs and grids, quotes, facts lists, a map of the entry's own geotagged photos and captions — as a standalone /journal section, or as a single essay on one subpage. New entries can start from a template.

→ Journal & Photo Essays Guide

Theming

Seven built-in presets with distinct visual identities — or mix and match with fine-grained control over colors, fonts, corners, photo frames, hero layout, and grid style.

Studio Modern is the default: Leica precision rebuilt around the Archivo grotesque, with IBM Plex Mono for every piece of photographic metadata, hairline rules, zero radius, and red as signal only.

Studio Modern, dark and light — every preset ships both, and visitors switch with a toggle in the navigation bar.

theme: studio-modern # or: studio, minimal, editorial, classic, noir, monograph

→ View all Themes & Configuration Guide

Docker

Docker Compose (recommended)

services:
  lightbox:
    build: .
    container_name: immich-folio
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - '7211:7211'
    env_file:
      - .env.local
    volumes:
      - ./content:/app/content

Run with:

docker compose up -d

The gallery will be available at http://localhost:7211.

The content/ volume must be read-write — the setup wizard, the admin panel, the journal and the backup rotation all write into it. A :ro mount leaves the wizard unable to complete and the admin panel unable to save.

For standalone docker run, the health check, TLS behind a reverse proxy, and what the gallery does while Immich is unreachable:

→ Deployment Guide

Admin Panel

A built-in visual editor at /admin lets you manage your gallery without editing YAML files manually.

Enable it by setting ADMIN_PASSWORD in your environment:

ADMIN_PASSWORD=your-secure-admin-password

Or set the password in the setup wizard, which stores it as an scrypt hash rather than in your environment. An ADMIN_PASSWORD variable takes precedence over the stored one if both are present.

Then navigate to http://your-site/admin and log in. The panel is protected by its own password, separate from any album passwords, and writes straight to gallery.yaml / settings.yaml with automatic backups.

Login · page builder · album picker · settings editor

→ Admin Panel Guide

What's New

v0.17.0 — originals as a ZIP, and a richer journal:

• Download originals as a ZIP — a whole album, or just the photos a client picked in proofing, as one archive of the originals. Opt-in per album; contributed by @lancetm714
• Journal templates — start a new entry from eight structures, from a wedding to a hiking trip
• New journal blocks — photo grids, facts lists, a map with the pins you choose, and a slice of an album; reorder blocks by dragging → Journal guide
• Unsaved admin edits survive navigation — switching tabs or reloading no longer throws your changes away
• Plain-HTTP installs — admin login and gallery passwords now work at http://host:7211

Upgrade note: visitors' proofing favourites from before v0.17.0 are not carried over. Nothing else to migrate.

Security fixes ship in normal releases, so running the latest release is the recommended baseline.

→ Full history in CHANGELOG.md and the GitHub releases

Tech Stack

• Next.js 16 (App Router, standalone output)
• React 19
• TypeScript
• Vanilla CSS (no framework)

Contributors

Immich Folio is maintained by @ralksta and made better by the people below. Thank you — every one of these made the project easier to live with.

• @lancetm714 — built the setup wizard that turns a fresh install into a few clicks in the browser instead of hand-written config files. Also added custom favicons, so your portfolio gets its own icon in the browser tab, and made a gallery with no albums yet a perfectly valid starting point rather than an error. In v0.15.0, made client proofing work properly: the selection bar floats again with page transitions on, and it is readable in light mode. Also brought links to journal quote attributions. In v0.17.0, built the ZIP download: a whole album, or just the photos a client picked, as one archive of the originals — streamed, so even a large shoot arrives complete.
• @ImScheinox — found and fixed portrait photos rendering as landscape tiles, because the grid ignored the camera's EXIF orientation flag. That brought the masonry layout's stagger back for anyone whose camera records portrait frames that way, which is most of them.
• Jules — an automated reviewer that has been quietly hardening the project in the background: better screen-reader support in the photo grid, and a series of fixes keeping the public endpoints from being overwhelmed by traffic.
• Dependabot — keeps every dependency current, which is most of the reason security fixes land here quickly.

Contributions are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md to get started. Pull requests target the dev branch.

License

MIT License — free to use and modify for the Immich community.