What a model adds

generate --include steers a new cut and has the selection protections described here. A web pool tick saves an owner revision without scoring or choosing pictures again.

The Basic tier makes the whole film from metadata, pixels and small CPU classifiers. The gpu tier adds captions and Laya for the pictures in the cut and their candidates. The full tier adds a text model that reads the draft, as annotation lines, and polishes it: this page is how. What each tier adds, feature by feature: What a GPU or a model adds.

The prose model gets text only and never decides sharing. Rules, picture classifiers and Laya own that check. A configured LLM can also write titles and music mood on Basic or GPU without changing the selection tier. Costs and setup are on What a model adds, what it costs.

Which route a cut takes

Every cut resolves the product tier first, then drafts with rules on every tier; on Full, it either refines that draft or (Route C) plans the whole film explicitly; every route ends through the same shared admission and final checks.

• tier: auto picks the tier: The three tiers. The tier owns the reader and preparation switches; they are not independent choices.
• The first draft uses metadata and CPU facts on every tier, even when captions are already banked, so it never depends on an earlier caption job. Captions arrive during the polish, for the selected shots and their candidates. A shareable film's first draft is cut for family viewing: only the polish has the captions a shareable clearance needs, so the shareable check runs there, on every shot and replacement.
• Route B covers months, years, seasons, trips, special days and person films. It also covers separate date windows, such as the same day across years or a birthday with flashbacks.
• Route C is selected with advanced.editorial.thin_model_layer: false. There the model reads the period's stories, weighs them, folds trips and recurring activities, and picks the moments. Standing, spacing, the look-alike check and every pass after the draft stay the same facts.

The polish (Route B)

In order: read the period account, vote on the draft's unprotected shots, try checked replacements, review the newcomers those replacements bring in, then, only if the film is still short, read further episodes.

The vote. The model gets the draft as text, in blocks of at most 12 shots, under the period's account and whose film it is. It answers one question, reject-only: which of these shots add nothing? Each block is asked in source order, and in a second, hashed order only when the first named a shot it may move. A shot named in either order is offered a replacement and keeps its place until one passes every check. If the bounded candidate search finds nothing suitable, the original stays. Sharing and unusable-picture checks can still remove a shot outright.

What the vote can't touch. A favourite, a picture an episode reading recorded as worth a place of its own, the only shot of a close family member, and a story's only shot that isn't a portrait (a place outdoors, a crowd, a race, a party: the frame, people, activity and location heads say which; an empty interior doesn't count). Left alone, the vote reads a road race as filler and a posed selfie as the point. A block made only of those is not asked. Only a gate removes them. In a film that gives every year a shot, a year's last shot is kept from the vote and from the standing gate too: only the sharing check, a source rule or a repeat takes it. Pictures passed with generate --include are added back after the polish either way.

Seats. A refusal is a seat, not a hole. N seats take only the room the draft left unused, at the 3.5 s minimum hold. R seats swap within the original shot's time; T seats can use the seconds a gate-refused shot freed. Both work even when the draft already filled the film. If no replacement passes, an R or D seat keeps the original. A T seat stays empty because its original failed a gate. The record names the failed attempt and any original retained without a replacement.

Seat	What it is for
N	a story the library records something about and the draft gave no shot
R	replaces a shot the vote named in both orders
T	replaces a shot a gate refused
D	swaps out a shot one order named; needs no room

A seat's page is its own story's pictures. An R or T seat then reads on into the pictures of the other stories the film already holds, nearest in time first, so it doesn't end empty while the film has material. The refused moment comes first, then the moments the cut lacks, moving ones first, the favourite first inside a moment. A refill's page puts the kind of shot its story holds fewer of (portrait or texture) on top of all that, among the pictures the library vouches for (a star, a video, someone Immich knows). A removed shot shorter than 2 s still frees a whole seat; finishing shaves the fraction the refill runs over. The model picks from 12 rows at most; the facts then say whether the pick stands, and a failed pick gets one more try, as does an R or T pick a gate refuses. A replacement for a shot the vote named comes from another moment: the vote judged the moment, and a frame taken seconds apart adds nothing either. A newcomer that repeats a scene the cut already holds (the same scene prints the final duplicate review reads) is refused on the spot; the outgoing shot is excluded from this comparison. The run record keeps the shot-kind mix of the draft and of the polished cut. Every newcomer is voted on again inside the block it joined. An ordinary candidate named weak in either order is revoked: trading one weak picture for another has not improved the draft. Its original comes back; an R or T seat can try once more within the existing budget. Protected pictures keep the protections described above.

A short film gets one more look

On a cold library, a story the draft never reached has no reading, so it can never show it holds something worth a place. When the polished film is short by S seconds, the polish reads at most 2 × ceil(S / 3.5) of those unread episodes (a week the film doesn't reach first, then a day, then by worthiness, close family, motion and standing), and opens at most ceil(S / 3.5) N seats for the stories whose reading records a moment. A story whose reading records nothing gets no seat, and the film stays short.

The budget. Up to 4 questions per 12 draft shots, 4 per seat, and one per three episodes the short-film look reads. Sharing uses no prose-LLM calls. The run record keeps what it asked against that budget, and the run logs a warning when it goes over.

When the account can't be read, it is asked once more. A second failure ships the no-model film exactly: the run logs The model polish did not run (...); the film is the rules draft, the record says ran: false with the reason. The filler pass runs either way.

When an episode can't be read, the account can still use its factual card. The run record keeps each demanded episode's availability and exact evidence identity under episode_reading_health. An unresolved reading marks that section degraded and adds a warning to the selection trace. A later successful read is marked recovered; it clears the unresolved warning and keeps the successful reading banked. A completed film can therefore still have an incomplete model pass, which the run evidence now makes visible.

Reading on demand

A model film starts with the Basic draft. Missing captions and clip evidence are acquired for selected shots and actual candidates. The reader may expand a selected shot to its whole episode for context, using existing annotations without captioning every neighbour. It asks what happened, one representative and the moments worth a record. The period's account combines those readings with rules-based cards for the other episodes. Existing matching readings and captions are reused.

Four steps: build the rules draft, read the demanded episodes, reuse or write the period account, then refine the film.

Accounts are one per calendar month, one per year, and for a longer window one per calendar year it touches plus one over the span, up to 8 per request. Each is keyed by exactly what it summarises and the model that wrote it, so a second cut of the same period asks nothing again. immich-memories prepare --overviews reads a whole window ahead of time instead; it needs a model reader.

advanced.llm.reader_concurrency sets how many independent requests overlap. Unset, it is 1 for a loopback, private IP or bare service name and 4 for a dotted DNS name or public IP. Dotted LAN names count as hosted; set reader_concurrency: 1 when needed. The owned reader always serializes requests.

What else the model writes

• The title, for person, month, season, year, album, holiday, on-this-day and special-day films; trips only with --llm-title, and --no-llm-title keeps the template. With no model the template writes it.
• The music's mood, from the film's story titles and captions, in one text call (audio/text_mood.mood_for_cut). With no model the clips' own mood decides, or "calm".
• The thesis, the period's account in up to 150 words. It steers the vote, and the storyboard and runs story show it on every film the model polished or planned.

The captions under the pictures are dates and places, on every tier: the date from Immich metadata, the place from Immich's city, or the resolved city, town or village when network.geocoding is on and found one. Story titles and the storyboard read the same place name.

The keys

Key	Default	What it does
tier	auto	Resolves Basic, GPU or Full from inference capability and the configured LLM; controls preparation and selection together
advanced.editorial.thin_model_layer	true	false makes the model plan every film whole (Route C)
Laya	follows the tier	Enabled on GPU and Full, off on Basic; not a separate preparation choice (details)
advanced.llm.reader_concurrency	unset	requests in flight: 1 local, 4 hosted when unset