Picking each shot

Once a story has its shots, each one has to be a moment and a frame. You shot 30 frames of the agility run in four minutes: that is one moment, and it gets one frame. The one you starred wins. Without a star, the one that moves wins (a video, or a Live Photo whose clip moves), then the frame with more of the people Immich knows, then the frame where the runner you named fills the picture over the one where they're a speck at the edge, then the sharp one over the blurry one. Only then does the clock decide.

Every rule here runs on a plain NAS. With a model, the draft is picked exactly this way and the model then polishes it (What a model adds).

The chain

Swipe sideways, or focus the diagram and use the arrow keys, to see more.

Which frame carries a moment

rule_representative_rank (editorial_rule_quality.py) sorts a moment's frames by these keys, in order. Each key only breaks the ties of the one before it.

1. Your favourite.
2. A frame an earlier model reading named for its episode. Empty on a library no model has read; on one that has, the no-model draft reads it for free.
3. It moves: a video, or a Live Photo whose clip measured at least 1.5 (see below).
4. More people Immich knows in it, or more faces.
5. The frame shows the person: a subject rung from 1 to 3, one point for having a face's width of air to every border and one for being the largest face in the picture (subject_framing.py). In a person film only that person's face counts, and a bigger face of someone else costs the rung.
6. More of the frame is that person.
7. No pixel warning: SOFT (blurry), DARK or BLOWN OUT lose.
8. The people head saw somebody.
9. The middle of the burst over its first and last frames.
10. The clock.

On a story with more moments than max(6, 3 × its shots), the moments offered to it are also sorted first: starred ones, then moving ones, then lively ones, and it reaches for a few more moving moments if the list filled up with stills. Below that size every moment is offered.

Strangers come last. A moment whose people are all strangers to your library (faces nobody named, hidden people, or people only the people head saw) is not "lively" for that sort, and when the draft picks a story's moments without a model it takes them after every other moment of the story: stars, then the rest spread over the story's span, then the strangers. So a frame of the crowd at a race loses its one slot to a frame of the same day with someone you named in it. A moment with no people at all (a view, a place) is not demoted, and a library that names nobody keeps its order.

What a frame must pass

Draft picks and replacements use the same admission rules. A replacement gets its own story weight and purpose, then passes standing, audience, spacing and repetition checks against the shots it would join. Newly acquired caption or motion facts are read before that decision. This also applies when replacing a duplicate or giving a missing family member a seat. The existing depth pass can add a distinct view inside an already shown moment; that exception does not transfer to a replacement. Candidate decisions are recorded in the run's private derived-decisions/picture-admission.private.json file.

Free. Not already a shot, and not a picture the carrier rules keep as evidence only (excluded_carrier_sources): a document the detector names, a screen the screen head flags, a still at an exact phone-screen size, and, where there is a caption, a caption about a screen, a face close-up, medical care or a grid of identical items. The check covers every burst member and motion clip, before standing is scored. New evidence from preparing a replacement runs through the same check; a refusal leaves its slot open for another eligible candidate. A refused companion does not mark its clean lead as permanently bad.

Spaced. Two shots of the same moment must be at least five minutes apart in capture time.

Standing. Does it stand on its own? Objects and empty rooms out, people and animals in. No model is asked, on any tier: RuleStructureReader.standing scores every picture 0, 1 or 2 from its facts, and StandingGate refuses a score under 1.

• A favourite, or a picture you ticked, scores 2, always.
• 0 for a body part with no face: legs, feet, shoes or hands alone. The frame head calls it a body-part close-up, or the caption names a body part or footwear and no animal, and Immich found no face on it. A face makes it a person, and a paw is never a body part. This is a fixed rule on top of the points table, not fitted to it: the public set's teacher keeps many of these shots, so it costs agreement there, and it stays because it is how you want your film made.
• 0 when its video frames mostly miss the subject (frames=subject_often_missing: fewer than 6 of 8 sampled frames show a moment), or when the points table below says it carries nothing.
• Otherwise the heads decide: people, an activity, or an outdoor or public place scores 2; nobody, no activity and a private interior scores 0; an indoor scene with nobody in it scores 1.

The points table (editorial_standing_facts.py) comes in two versions, and the caption version in two fits: one for a library where Immich reads faces, one for a library where it recognised nobody at all (face recognition off, or only pets and places). Weights were fitted on a public CC BY corpus against a hosted reader's answers and rounded to half points; nothing in it came from anyone's library.

	Heads only (NAS default)	Heads and caption, faces read	Heads and caption, no faces
Refuses at	3.0 points	4.5 points	4.5 points
frame_kind	empty room 4, accidental frame 4, lone object 3.5, body part 2.5, record 2.5, screen or document 2	the four "nothing" kinds 2, record or screen 1, scenery -1	the four "nothing" kinds 2.5, record or screen 1.5, scenery -0.5
People head	two -0.5, small group -1, crowd -1.5	two -0.5, small group -1, crowd -1.5	two -0.5, small group or crowd -1
Flags	children -1, document +1, screen +1, BLOWN OUT +1.5, SOFT +0.5	children -0.5, document +1, screen +1, BLOWN OUT +1.5, SOFT +1	children -0.5, document +1, screen +1, BLOWN OUT +2, SOFT +1
Face		people head saw somebody, Immich found no face +1
Caption		nobody alive +1.5; objects +1, screens and devices +1; feet or hands, food, room or furniture, plants, text or signs +0.5 each; goods on display (a shelf, products, a showroom) make the frame a lone object	nobody alive +2; the same words; goods on display +1

Two short cuts sit above the table. A frame the head calls a people moment is never refused when it is sharp, not dark, and Immich found a face on it. A picture whose caption names a person is never refused when Immich found a face on it, and one that names an animal never is (a stuffed dog or a statue of one still counts as an object). The frame head calls a pair of legs in a mirror a people moment too; with no face in it, it is counted like anything else. A picture of your cat asleep on the sofa stands; the sofa alone does not. In a library where Immich recognised nobody, an empty face list says nothing, and the heads and the caption are taken at their word.

The same face rule decides whether a picture "shows life" for the gate: a picture with life in a major story is only ordered, never refused, and a person Immich found no face for no longer counts. A picture with nobody in it serves its story only when it is starred, or when the story is major, dominant or minor and holds more than two pictures. Anywhere else it is refused as context (context_rejected in derived-decisions/story-selection.private.json). A custom film about something you wrote (a renovation, the works on a house) drops that rule: its pictures were chosen for the subject, so a stripped wall or a room under construction can carry its story, as long as it stands. A custom film of its window alone keeps the rule.

An album handed over with a written subject (generate --from-album "Bread" --subject "bread making along the years") goes one step further. The album is a pool picked for that subject, so its pictures stand on the subject and a score of 0 no longer refuses them: a loaf on a counter scores 0 like any lone object, and stays. A video whose frames mostly miss its subject is still refused, and every other gate still runs: sharing and the family-viewing holds, source eligibility, provenance, look-alikes, duplicates and length. The allocation gives every year the album holds a shot, even a year whose stories the reader weighed none. Each shot that got in this way is listed under stood_on_subject in derived-decisions/story-selection.private.json, with its score and why. A custom date range with a written subject is not a pool and keeps the rules above.

Once a moment's frames are through the gate, the ones that stand are sorted again: favourite first, then the higher standing score, then the order above. A still that scores 2 can beat a video that scores 1.

New. The story's next shot must not look like one it already holds: a preview hash within 10 bits, compared inside the same story or the same calendar day, against the shots of its own moment and the kept shot just before and after it. A video or a moving Live Photo is never a repeat of a still, and a favourite is never refused for looking like a picture you did not star. A refused frame comes back when nothing else can fill its slot. No model compares pictures, on any tier.

Videos and Live Photos

A video always plays, from 2 seconds long (shorter clips are stubs and never become shots) up to a 6-second hold. When someone is mid-sentence at the cut, the end stretches to the end of what they say, never more than 12 seconds from the start.

A Live Photo plays as motion on every tier, the plain NAS included, when its clip moves and shows its subject. The motion is measured during the cut, for the Live Photos the cut kept, and banked per picture so the next cut reads it instead (store/cut_measurements).

Swipe sideways, or focus the diagram and use the arrow keys, to see more.

The residual is the optical flow left after the camera's own movement is taken out, over 12 frames at 320x240. A clip only ever costs a Live Photo its motion, never its place: a starred Live Photo whose clip is mostly pocket lining plays as its still. The burst and stitching rules are on Photos, Live Photos and HDR.

A true video whose sampled frames mostly miss its subject scores 0 on standing and is refused, unless you starred it: a starred video of a wall means something happened there.

With a model planning the whole film

On the model's own route (thin_model_layer: false), the model picks the moments of each story from a shortlist of their captions, and reads each video's motion line: the sentence the caption server wrote at ingest from three keyframes. A Live Photo's sentence reaches it only once its residual measured at least 1.5, and a video whose frames measured under 1.5 has its sentence withheld unless you starred it. Standing, spacing and the look-alike check are the same facts as above. Missing motion sentences use plain clip facts and produce a visible warning; the cut does not contact the motion-description server.