Holiday and Then and Now
Two memory types that do not cover one continuous stretch of time. Each builds a separate window per year, and the pipeline queries every one of them — a Holiday memory across five years asks Immich for five windows around that holiday, not for the five years between them.
That is the whole reason they exist. A year in review is a period; these two are a recurrence.
Holiday
The same occasion, across the years. Christmas 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026 in one video.
immich-memories generate --memory-type holiday --holiday christmas --years-back 5
--holiday is required. --years-back defaults to 5, and --years-back 0 is read as unset rather than as an error — pass a positive number.
What --holiday accepts
Ten names the pipeline resolves for any year:
| Name | Falls on |
|---|---|
new_year | 1 January |
valentines | 14 February |
easter | computed — Western Easter Sunday |
mothers_day | second Sunday of May |
fathers_day | third Sunday of June |
halloween | 31 October |
thanksgiving | fourth Thursday of November |
christmas_eve | 24 December |
christmas | 25 December |
new_years_eve | 31 December |
The moving ones are calculated rather than tabulated, so they stay correct in years nobody has thought about yet.
Anything else is read as MM-DD, which is how a household's own occasion works:
# The day you moved in, every year since
immich-memories generate --memory-type holiday --holiday 09-14 --years-back 4
An unrecognised name that is not a valid MM-DD fails immediately with the list of known holidays rather than generating something wrong.
The window around the date
Each year contributes the holiday ± 2 days — a five-day window. A celebration that starts on Christmas Eve and runs into Boxing Day is one memory, not three. This is not exposed as a CLI flag.
Asking before the holiday has happened
If you omit --year, the starting year steps back when the occasion has not occurred yet. Asking for Christmas in August would otherwise spend one of your requested years on a window no photo can fall in.
An explicit --year is treated as a deliberate choice and is left alone:
# In August 2026 this covers Christmas 2025, 2024, 2023
immich-memories generate --memory-type holiday --holiday christmas --years-back 3
# ...but this covers 2026, 2025, 2024 — even though 2026's has not happened
immich-memories generate --memory-type holiday --holiday christmas --years-back 3 --year 2026
When to use it
When the material exists because of the date. A holiday is the day a library reliably has something every single year, which is what makes it worth spanning years rather than covering one occasion. If a year is missing photos, that year simply contributes nothing.
Then and Now
One early year beside the present one. Not the decade between them — just the two ends.
immich-memories generate --memory-type then_and_now --years-back 10
--years-back defaults to 10 and is the gap between the two years, not a count of them. There are always exactly two.
# 2016 and 2026
immich-memories generate --memory-type then_and_now --year 2026 --years-back 10
Pass a positive number. --years-back 0 is read as unset and falls back to 10 rather than erroring — the flag uses a falsy default, so zero and omitted are indistinguishable to it. The web UI's picker starts at 1, so the ambiguity cannot be reached there.
The gap is required either way: a then-and-now with no distance between its two years is just a now.
Two whole years, not two windows
Unlike Holiday, each side is a full calendar year. A narrow window in a year long past is usually empty, and the point is to have enough material on both sides for the contrast to read.
Clips play in chronological order, so the "then" year runs as one block and the "now" year follows it. The two ranges are built most-recent-first internally — that is how the memory derives its span — but the cut itself is oldest to newest, like every other memory.
When to use it
When the subject changed and the change is the story — a child, a house, a garden, a face. It is deliberately blunt: two years, no interpolation, and the viewer does the arithmetic.
Both in the web UI
Both appear as cards in Step 1. Holiday takes the holiday, the most recent year to include, and how many years to span. Then and Now takes the recent year and how far back the other sits.
Titles
Neither is titled after its span, because the span describes neither of them — five Christmases run across five years, and a then-and-now spans a decade it deliberately skips.
| Type | Title | Subtitle |
|---|---|---|
| Holiday | the occasion — "Christmas" | "Through the Years" |
| Then and Now | both ends — "2016 & 2026" | "Then and Now" |
Holiday's pair is currently produced by the web UI only. On the CLI a Holiday memory still falls through to the generic span title ("December 2021 to December 2026"); Then and Now is titled correctly on both.
A custom MM-DD holiday with no name of its own is titled by its date ("14 September").