Pictaria Server
The Server guide.
What each tab of the dashboard does and how to use it day to day — no terminal required. Written for the person who lives in the photo library, which doesn't have to be the person who installed the container. (For installation and configuration, see the technical docs.)
Opening the dashboard
Pictaria Server lives at an address on your home network —
usually http://your-server:4080. Whoever set it up
can tell you the exact address and the password; that one
password is all you need, on any device on your network. Sign in
once and the tabs along the top are the whole product:
Insights · Enrich · Curate · Albums · Frame · Remote,
plus the gear for Settings.
Home
The first page after signing in: a status view that tells you the server is healthy and connected to your Immich library, with shortcuts into each section. If a frame or a module ever seems off, this is the quickest place to see whether everything is still talking to everything else.
Insights — understand your collection
Your library, finally legible. Insights is computed entirely on your server from a periodic sweep of the library, so it's instant to browse — and every number on the page is clickable: click it to see the actual photos behind it, open the same view in Immich, or turn it into an album on the spot.
Photos per year, and a week-by-week "where you were" ribbon with automatically detected trips. Filter the whole picture through a lens — one person, one place, one tag — and watch decades re-draw themselves.
A constellation of the people in your photos, linked by how often they appear together, plus leaderboards. Click a person for their card: their years, their places, the people they're photographed with — and keep clicking from card to card.
Cities and countries ranked by your photos, each with its own card. If the map data splits one spot into several names, Settings → Location Groups lets you merge them.
Which cameras and phones shot your library, your top tags, and the records: busiest day, longest quiet spell, home base, furthest photo from home.
Enrich — let AI describe your photos
Enrich has an AI look at photos and write down what it sees: a caption, tags from a fixed menu (so they stay consistent), and quality scores. That's what makes the rest of the product smarter — searchable captions, honest "best of" albums, and better keeper suggestions in Curate.
You start a run and give it a budget — say, a few hundred photos — and watch the progress strip. Runs can be stopped and resumed; history is kept. Nothing happens unless you start a run.
A review list shows what the AI wrote for each photo. Agree, fix, or send a photo onward to Curate for a human decision.
The AI provider is chosen in Settings: a local model means photos never leave your machine; or use your own OpenAI or OpenRouter key. Optionally, captions can be written back to Immich descriptions — off unless someone turns it on.
Curate — pick the keepers
Curate answers one question thousands of times, fast: of these near-identical shots, which one is the keeper? Your decisions here shape what the frames show.
Photos taken in the same moment — bursts, retakes, near-duplicates — collapse into a stack instead of cluttering the list. Open a stack to compare side by side.
Each stack comes with a suggested keeper: a silver ★ picked by photo-quality scores, or a gold ★ when the optional AI referee has compared the whole burst side by side (with a short note on why). One action keeps the best and skips the rest — or pick a different winner yourself.
Everything has a keystroke, so a rainy afternoon genuinely puts a dent in a 30,000-photo backlog. And it all works with AI switched off — the stars are suggestions, never decisions.
Albums — albums that maintain themselves
The Albums tab builds real Immich albums from rules instead of hand-picking, and keeps them up to date on a schedule. "Alicia and David in San Francisco" stays current forever — every device that can see your Immich albums (including the frames) gets the result.
Compose filters: people, places (multiple cities work), dates, cameras, tags, or a free-text search. A preview with a result count shows exactly what you'll get before anything is created.
For free-text rules, "best of" double-checks every search hit against your own enrichment data and ranks keepers using your Curate decisions — a "Top 50" that is your best 50, not a search engine's first 50. Photos not yet enriched are reported honestly instead of guessed at.
Every album the server maintains, with its rule and schedule. Edit the rule, refresh on demand, or stop managing an album at any time.
Frame — what your frames have shown
The stats page for your photo frames: a ledger of what has actually been displayed, your most-shown photos, and which voice commands get used. It answers "has the new album actually been showing?" with data instead of a feeling. Counts only — voice transcripts are never stored.
Remote — control any frame from your phone
Open Remote on your phone and you're holding the remote control for every Pictaria Frame in the house: see what each one is showing right now, pause, skip forward or back, and push a different album to it. With more than one frame, a device picker makes sure commands reach only the frame you chose. Changes happen on the frame within moments.
Settings — the gear, top right
Nearly everything is configured here, from the browser, while the server runs — changes apply immediately. The sections you're most likely to visit day to day:
Every frame that has ever connected, by name. Rename or remove retired devices; this is also where a re-onboarded frame's old entry gets cleaned up.
Merge nearby map labels into one place ("Brooklyn" and "Kings County" become one), and rename places the way your family actually says them.
How the frames listen and speak: wake words, the voice used for answers, and the "tell me…" general questions — with try-it-now testers so you can hear a voice before choosing it.
Schedules, AI provider and budgets, taxonomy and prompts — the knobs behind the three big tabs.
Scheduled backups of everything Pictaria knows (decisions, enrichment, albums' rules). Your photos are not in these — they never leave Immich.
Light or dark dashboard, and the place to paste a supporter key if you have one — which adds a badge and our gratitude, and changes nothing else.
A good rhythm
Pictaria doesn't need daily attention. A pattern that works well: