Love immich, you can make seperate accounts and do quite fine grained access controll and the search feature is da bomb

Highly recommend using Immich and just creating a separate account(s) for your friend(s). You can even set storage quotas for each individual person.

Another vote for Immich

If they're sharing it with me, then sure, I'll add it to the folder for that party, holiday, event

Immich would scan it and faces are taken care of and if there's metadata in there, great, if not, dunno if I could be bothered to edit it... maybe date stamp if that was wildly off.

I only store some family photos. I use immich and have assigned an album for that.

@IanTwenty @selfhosted

I just throw them in.

Only sometimes I create subfolders by name of the other person.

I don't care about metadata (probably should, but have yet to find a way that's easy and future-proof)

Immich

Figured I'd ask here as thought self-hosters would care most about looking after their photos.

Couldn't be more wrong in my case. I host immich so I don't have to worry about taking care of my photos. I hate taking care of my photos. I hate organizing them, and almost never go back to look at them anyways. Immich just yeets them onto my NAS and I can use visual search to sometimes find what I'm looking for with nearly zero effort from me.

All of that, to answer your question, I just throw them on Immich and they appear on the timeline in roughly the correct spot. I also will often share a link, asking friends and family to upload to my Immich server.