Your photo library

Gallery is a photo library that belongs to a workspace, not to a person. Everybody in that workspace opens the same grid, the same albums and the same trash, and anybody in it can add to it. Your name stays on the photos you added, and that is what decides who may erase one for good.

If you want a library only you can see, keep it in a workspace with no other members. That is the whole mechanism: there is no per-photo privacy setting and no hidden folder. See What a workspace is.

What is actually stored#

Your photo is converted to AVIF on your own device before it is uploaded, at your plan's resolution cap, and what Nemi keeps is that converted photo and a small thumbnail. The original file is not kept. That is deliberate and it cannot be undone later, so Gallery is a library to look at and share, not a master archive of your negatives. Keep your originals wherever you keep them today, or put them in Files.

Converting a photo throws away what the camera wrote into it, so that information is read out first and stored as data next to the photo: the capture date and time, the camera make and model, the lens, the exposure settings, the orientation and, if the camera recorded them, the location and altitude. Open a photo and press the details button, or the i key, to see all of it.

Getting around a large library#

• Photos is everything in the library, newest first. Added by me narrows it to your own uploads, which is the row people reach for the day a library stops being theirs alone.
• Favourites holds anything anybody starred. A star belongs to the library rather than to you, so your colleague sees it too.
• The two zoom buttons in the header make the tiles larger or smaller, and the scrubber on the right jumps to a month or a date.
• Click a photo to open it full size. Click again with cmd or ctrl held, or use the tick in a tile's corner, to select instead, and shift-click to take a run of photos in one go.

Who may do what#

Working in the library at the same time#

When the live layer is switched on for your account, you can see who else has the library open and which photo they are looking at, leave a comment or a reaction on a photo, and watch new uploads appear in your grid without a refresh. There is also an activity panel in the header that reads the library's recent history, with a folder import collapsed into one line rather than four hundred. If you do not see any of that, it has not been switched on for your account yet.

Downloading a photo gives you the stored AVIF copy, because that is what exists. If you need the file exactly as your camera made it, you need the copy you kept yourself.