[Feature Request] Photos – Granular User and Group Access Permissions
I would like to suggest an important improvement to the TerraMaster Photos application:
a comprehensive system for managing access permissions to photos, folders, and albums for individual users and user groups.
This functionality would be extremely useful not only in business environments but also for ordinary families using a single TerraMaster NAS.
1. Why is this necessary?
Imagine a family of four using the same NAS to store and organize their photographs.
Each family member has their own TerraMaster account and personal photo collection. However, they also want to maintain shared family albums.
For example:
- Parents should have access to their own private photographs and shared family albums.
- Children should have access to their own photographs and selected family albums, but not necessarily their parents' private collections.
- Certain albums, such as family vacations or celebrations, should be accessible to everyone.
- Some photographs should be shared with only one specific family member.
- Users should not be able to discover restricted photographs through search results, thumbnails, facial recognition, or other AI-powered features.
These are completely normal requirements even within a single household.
The same principle applies to small businesses and companies, where multiple employees may need to access a shared photo library while maintaining separate permissions for different departments, projects, or confidential materials.
2. Proposed functionality
I suggest implementing the following features directly within the Photos application:
- Private photo libraries: Each user has a personal photo library that other users cannot access without explicit permission.
- Shared albums and folders: Users can share selected albums or folders with specific NAS users or groups.
- Granular access permissions: Support separate permission levels such as View Only, Upload/Add Photos, Edit/Manage, and Full Access.
- Group-based permissions: Allow administrators to create or use existing TOS user groups and assign permissions to entire groups.
- Permission inheritance: Subfolders and albums should optionally inherit access permissions from their parent folders.
- Simple permission management: Users with appropriate privileges should be able to manage sharing and permissions directly through the Photos interface without navigating through multiple TOS administration menus.
- Complete privacy enforcement: Access restrictions must apply not only when opening photographs but also to thumbnails, search results, facial recognition, People, Places, Scenes, AI-generated collections, and other indexing features.
- Clear separation of personal and shared content: The Photos interface should make it easy to distinguish between My Photos, Shared with Me, and Shared/Family/Team Libraries.
3. Important: Permissions must work throughout the entire Photos application
Simply restricting access to folders at the file-system level is not enough if photographs remain discoverable through the Photos application's search, indexing, or AI features.
Users must only be able to see photographs and associated metadata for which they have permission.
For example, if a user does not have access to a particular album, photographs from that album must not appear in their search results, face recognition collections, location-based browsing, or automatically generated categories.
4. Why this would improve TerraMaster Photos
A NAS is naturally a multi-user device. Families and businesses purchase NAS systems specifically to centralize data while retaining control over who can access it.
A modern photo management application should support this concept natively.
With proper user and group permissions, TerraMaster Photos could become a much more practical alternative to cloud photo services, combining centralized storage, collaborative albums, and genuine privacy.
Such functionality would make Photos significantly more useful for families, small businesses, photographers, and teams.
5. Expected result
Ideally, an administrator should be able to configure a shared photo library once, assign appropriate permissions to users and groups, and let everyone use Photos normally within their assigned access rights.
Users should not need complicated workarounds or manual file-system administration for everyday photo sharing.
I believe granular user and group access management should be considered a fundamental feature of TerraMaster Photos, rather than an optional advanced capability.
I hope the TerraMaster development team will consider including this functionality in the future Photos development roadmap.