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#

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.

Using a photo somewhere else in Nemi#

The image picker in Docs, Sheets, Canvas and Forms has a Gallery tab, so a photo already in the library can go straight into a document without being uploaded twice. It costs no storage, because the document points at the library photo rather than copying it, and it disappears from the document if that photo is ever erased for good. See Images and attachments.

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.

Photos and the two assistants#

Nemi AI can look at your photos when you ask it to, which means the photo you pointed it at is sent to the company that runs the language model, along with your question. It never looks on its own. An assistant you connect yourself through the AI connection cannot reach the library at all, by any means. Neither of them is used to train anything, and nothing in Nemi identifies or names the people in a picture.