Immich 3.3 Arrives With Shared People, Birthday Memories, and a Much Faster Brain

There is a moment in every self-hosting journey when the infrastructure finally works, the Docker compose file is stable, the backups are boring, and then a family member asks the one question that actually matters: can we just share the photos? Immich, the open-source, self-hosted photo and video manager that has become the default Google Photos escape route, just made that question much easier to answer. Version 3.3.0, released this week, adds shared people management, birthday memories, and a set of machine learning upgrades that make the whole thing run faster on humbler hardware.

Immich is one of the most-starred self-hosted projects on GitHub, sitting above 32,000 stars, and it exists for a specific reason: people want Google Photos' conveniences, face recognition, semantic search, automatic phone backup, without giving Google their photo library. What 3.3 targets is the part Google still does best, making a photo library feel like one shared family collection instead of a pile of separate accounts.

Sharing people, not just photos

The headline feature is shared people management, which the release notes call "the next big milestone towards better sharing." Inside a cluster group, you can now share a recognized person with another user. The shared person shows up in both users' people lists on web and mobile, appears in the asset viewer and asset detail views, and can be edited by both people, with name and birth date as the shared fields.

There are some thoughtful details in how the sharing works. It is directional, which means each user has to share each person back for edits to flow both ways. By default, a name or birth date change applies to everyone with shared access, but you can flip an edit to "Only me" so your corrections stay private. There is also a preference in Sharing settings that makes either behavior the default, covering the typical family case where one or two people are responsible for keeping everyone's labels straight.

One caveat for now: the "Manage access" modal that controls all of this is available in the web interface, from both the People page and Sharing settings, but not yet on mobile.

Self-hosting a photo library was always possible. Making it feel like one shared family library is the harder problem, and Immich 3.3 goes straight at it.

Birthdays and tidier timelines

The smaller joy in this release is birthday memories. If a person in your library has a birthday, Immich now celebrates it with a special memory built from photos of their previous birthdays. It is a small, Google-Photos-shaped pleasure, and a sign of the project's ambition: the gap is no longer about search accuracy, it is about the little touches that make a library feel alive. There is also relief for anyone who edits photos outside Immich: edits made in your phone's gallery app now stack over the original instead of scattering both across the timeline.

A faster brain for modest hardware

The most important changes for long-time users are under the hood, in the machine learning pipeline. The team re-exported the same models in an optimized format, and the result is significantly faster inference with lower memory consumption across every backend, including plain CPU. The kicker is that the outputs are numerically equivalent to the old models, so there is no need to re-run face recognition, smart search, or any other ML job after upgrading. You just opt in by setting MACHINE_LEARNING_MODEL_REVISION=v2 on the machine learning container, and this setting will become the default in a later release.

The optimizations also bring two backends to parity with the rest. RKNPU, used by Rockchip boards that power many budget homelab boxes, now supports every model in the catalog including OCR for the first time. NVIDIA Ampere (30xx series) and newer GPUs get TensorRT RTX acceleration, and a set of cases where OpenVINO produced wrong outputs should now be resolved.

On top of that, Immich 3.3 adds support for the PP-OCRv6 model family, which is multilingual and significantly more accurate than the previous PP-OCRv5 generation. The family comes in three sizes, tiny for modest hardware, small as a notable accuracy jump, and medium as the highest quality option. If your library includes screenshots, documents, and signs, this is the release where searching them by their text starts to work well.

Better thumbnails, smarter logins

Visual quality gets a quiet but real improvement too. Immich now uses a more accurate linear-light resampling method for thumbnails and previews, improving detail preservation and brightness, especially in high-contrast scenes. All image formats benefit. The one catch is that thumbnails generated before this release are not touched by the change, so if you want the upgrade across your library, run thumbnail generation on all assets from the job panel.

Administrators get a genuinely useful change on the identity side. Immich supports OAuth claims for storage quota, user role, and preferred username, but until now those were only synced at registration. They are now synced on every login, so you can manage quotas and roles actively through your identity provider and Immich will adopt the changes.

The three-year-old bug that finally died

Buried in the release notes is the kind of fix that earns a project's trust: the macOS storage size bug. In some configurations, especially Docker on macOS, Immich reported storage usage off by a factor of 4096 or more. The underlying issue, number 4318, was the project's fourth oldest open ticket, sitting untouched for more than three years. That is the honest reality of volunteer-driven open source: the unglamorous bugs wait for their turn, and they do get their turn.

What to do before you update

As always with Immich, the standard advice applies: back up your database and library before upgrading. If you flip on the new ML model revision, expect the first model load to take a while, that preparation work is cached and much faster on subsequent loads. And if you care about the thumbnail improvement, remember it only applies to newly generated thumbnails.

Stepping back, 3.3 is a statement about where self-hosted software is heading. The early years of the homelab boom were about proving you could run your own services at all. The current era is about proving the services can be as good as the cloud originals, and as shared. Immich started as one person's way off Google Photos. It is becoming the family photo library that happens to live on a computer you own, and that is a much bigger idea.

References

• Immich, "Release v3.3.0," GitHub releases, October 2026
• Linuxiac, "Immich 3.3 Photo and Video Management Solution Adds People Sharing, Birthday Memories," October 2026
• Noted.lol, "Immich Keeps Getting Better, but Don't Forget Your Backups," October 2026
• AlternativeTo, "Immich 3.3 brings people sharing, birthday memories, new OCR models and synced OAuth claims," October 9, 2026