Birthday Compilations

A birthday compilation is the year of someone's life that ends on the birthday you are celebrating, plus that birthday in earlier years. For a 21 July birthday and --year 2025 it runs 22 July 2024 through 21 July 2025 — the party itself is in the video, and last year's party belongs to last year's video.

Set the birth date in Immich

Immich is where the date lives. Open People, pick the person, edit, and fill in the birth date. Every birthday memory then anchors on it — the CLI, the wizard and the nightly automation alike — and you never type it again.

Without one, a birthday memory refuses rather than guessing a date and quietly rendering the wrong twelve months.

What the video covers

Window	Span	Why
The rolling year	day after the previous birthday → the birthday	The year being celebrated
Each earlier birthday	±1 day around it	The "look how small you were" cutaways

Five earlier birthdays by default, the same reach On This Day and Holiday use. --years-back changes it, up to thirty.

Most of those single days hold nothing, and that is expected — the run prints one summary line for them (history: 2 of 5 earlier windows hold material) instead of a warning per year. An empty rolling year does still get a warning: that one means something is wrong.

CLI

With the birth date in Immich, --birthday takes no value:

immich-memories generate \
  --person "Emma" \
  --year 2025 \
  --birthday \
  --duration 600

To override it for one run — the stored date is missing or wrong — give the date:

immich-memories generate \
  --person "Emma" \
  --year 2025 \
  --birthday 07-21 \
  --duration 600

--year names the birthday being celebrated, not a calendar year to run forward from.

Give the date as MM-DD — month first, matching every other date in the project (RFC 3339 order). Slashed forms are rejected rather than guessed.

29 February is celebrated on the 28th in a year that has no 29th, and the ±1 day cutaways still reach the 29th in the years that do.

UI

There is no "Birthday" card. Two paths get you a birthday-anchored range:

• Person Spotlight card: pick the person, then tick Birthday to birthday. If Immich has a birth date on that person the checkbox turns itself on when you select them; without one it stays greyed out and says so.
• Custom card → Year tab → From Birthday, which gives you a Birthday date field and computes the rolling year from it. This one is the year only — no earlier-birthday cutaways.

See Step 1: Configuration.

Tips

• 10 minutes (600 seconds) is a good target duration for a party slideshow. Long enough to feel complete, short enough that people don't lose interest.
• Enable music if you've set up a backend. A soundtrack makes birthday videos way more watchable.
• Run analysis ahead of time so you're not waiting at the party. Generate the video the night before.
• If the person has a common name in your Immich library, double-check the face recognition is matching the right person before generating.