Immich's facial recognition allows you to instantly find every photo you've ever taken of a specific family member. It runs entirely locally on your LocalNode, meaning your biometric data never touches the cloud.
Overview
The machine learning model scans every photo for human faces, crops them, analyzes the geometry, and groups identical faces together. You then provide a name for that group.
Step 1: Wait for processing
Facial recognition is not instantaneous. After you upload a photo, it enters a queue.
If you just uploaded 10 photos, they will be scanned in seconds.
If you just uploaded 50,000 photos via Google Takeout, it may take 24–48 hours for the AI to process everything.
You can check the progress by logging into the web dashboard, clicking Administration > Jobs, and looking at the "Facial Recognition" progress bar.
Step 2: Naming people
Once faces are grouped, you need to assign them names.
Open the Immich app or web dashboard.
Go to the Search tab.
Under "People", you will see a grid of the most frequently appearing faces in your library.
Click on a face.
At the top of the screen, tap "Add Name" and type the person's name.
💡 Tip: Once a person is named, you can simply type their name into the main search bar to pull up every photo they are in. You can even combine searches, like "John and Jane at the beach".
Step 3: Merging duplicate faces
The AI is smart, but a person's face changes as they age, or they might be wearing sunglasses. Sometimes Immich creates two separate profiles for the same person.
In the web dashboard, go to the Search tab > People.
Click the Merge icon (two arrows combining into one) at the top right of the screen.
Select the primary face profile you want to keep.
Click all the other duplicate faces that belong to that same person.
Click Merge.
By merging faces, you actually train the AI to be smarter. It learns that "John with a beard" is the same as "John without a beard".
Step 4: Hiding strangers
The AI will detect every face. If you took a photo at a crowded concert, you might end up with 30 profiles of strangers in the background.
In the People view, click the Hide icon (an eye with a slash) at the top right.
Select all the random faces or blurry background people you don't care about.
Click Hide.
This doesn't delete the photos; it simply removes the faces from the primary People dashboard so it stays uncluttered.
