API Review

API Review

Purpose

Review Espframe's Immich integration as a senior API and embedded-systems engineer. Compare the implementation with the current official Immich API documentation and propose the best practical design for selecting photos and finding visually and contextually coherent portrait pairs.

Be bold. The review may recommend different endpoints, request flows, state models, caching strategies, filter architecture, configuration options, or a substantial rewrite of the integration when the evidence supports it. Do not limit the result to small patches around the current design.

Default to research and recommendations only. Do not edit code, change user behavior, or start a refactor unless the user explicitly asks for implementation.

Review Principles

• Use the current official Immich API documentation or official OpenAPI source as the authority. Browse it during every review because the API changes over time. Use third-party material only to supplement, never replace, official evidence.
• Establish which Immich versions Espframe intends to support. Distinguish documented behavior, observed repository assumptions, version-specific behavior, deprecated behavior, and proposals that require validation.
• Treat API key permissions and least privilege as part of the design. Do not recommend broader permissions without explaining why they are needed.
• Optimize for an ESP32-class client: limited heap, response buffers, storage, CPU, and network concurrency. Count round trips and consider payload size, streaming, pagination, retries, cancellation, and failure recovery.
• Preserve privacy: the frame should continue to communicate directly with the user's Immich server unless the user explicitly requests another service.
• Preserve existing settings and behavior through defaults, adapters, or a migration plan. New filtering power should not silently change an existing slideshow after upgrade.
• Prefer server-side narrowing when the documented API can express it, but account for endpoint semantics, selection bias, shared-library behavior, and the cost of extra count or probe requests.
• Separate confirmed API opportunities from hypotheses that need a prototype or real-library measurement.

Workflow

1. Establish the Current Contract

Inspect the branch, local changes, supported Immich assumptions, user-facing photo settings, API-key guidance, and validation coverage. Work around local changes and never revert user work.

Map the complete path from a saved setting to an Immich request, response parsing, candidate selection, image download, display, retry, and fallback. Start with these areas, then follow their callers and generated surfaces:

• common/addon/immich_api.yaml
• common/addon/immich_filter.yaml
• common/addon/immich_slideshow.yaml
• components/espframe/immich_helpers.h
• components/espframe/slideshow_component.h
• components/espframe/slideshow_controller.h
• Product-contract checks, configuration generation, docs, and relevant tests

Record every Immich endpoint, method, request field, response field, header, permission, pagination assumption, retry path, and fallback the product relies on. Identify duplicated filtering or selection rules across YAML, C++, web settings, generated assets, documentation, and tests.

2. Verify the Official API Surface

Locate and cite the current official documentation for every used or promising endpoint. At minimum, investigate the documented capabilities around:

• Random and metadata search
• Search statistics and pagination
• Albums and album assets, including shared albums
• People, faces, tags, favorites, dates, asset type, visibility, and archival state where supported
• Asset metadata and image delivery parameters
• Memories and other server-curated groupings
• Server version or capability discovery, authentication, and API-key permissions

Do not assume similarly named endpoints accept the same filters or return the same population. Compare schemas and semantics, not just route names. Note removed, deprecated, unstable, or version-gated options and propose a safe fallback for each recommendation that depends on them.

3. Evaluate Filtering as a Product Capability

Assess both what users can express and how accurately the request pipeline honors it. Consider:

• Combining sources and filters rather than forcing one mutually exclusive source when the API can safely support richer composition
• Inclusion and exclusion rules for albums, people, tags, favorites, date ranges, media type, rating, archive state, and orientation when documented
• AND/OR semantics, multiple selected values, empty results, invalid or deleted IDs, shared-library assets, and filters that cannot be combined server-side
• Uniform sampling across large libraries, pagination bias, repeated images, recent-history exclusion, and whether count-then-random-page flows remain correct as the library changes
• Clear UI wording and validation so users can predict the resulting slideshow
• Compatibility of new settings with saved configuration, backup/restore, generated web assets, documentation, and API-key permission guidance

Look beyond exposing every server field. Recommend filters that materially improve a photo-frame experience and explain which tempting options would add complexity without enough value.

4. Reimagine Portrait-Pair Discovery

Trace the current primary-photo and companion-photo workflow, including its date-window expansion, candidate limits, exclusions, preloading, cancellation, fallbacks, and "pairs only" behavior.

Evaluate alternatives using documented Immich data and endpoints. A strong proposal should consider whether candidates can be found and ranked by useful signals such as capture-time distance, shared album or event, recognized people, location, orientation and aspect ratio, asset quality, favorites, and recent display history. Only use signals the API actually exposes at acceptable cost.

Address both match quality and operational efficiency:

• Avoid pairing an asset with itself or repeatedly showing the same pair.
• Explain candidate-pool construction and scoring/tie-breaking rather than relying on arbitrary response order.
• Compare a single broad request, staged search, cached candidate index, and other viable architectures by round trips, payload size, heap use, latency, and API-version risk.
• Consider whether pairing should happen during source selection, prefetch, or display and how that choice affects responsiveness and wasted downloads.
• Define behavior when no strong match exists. A clean single-photo fallback is preferable to a visibly poor pair unless the user selected "pairs only."
• Propose measurable quality and performance targets plus representative fixtures or library scenarios for evaluation.

5. Design the Best Overall Integration

Do not evaluate endpoints in isolation. Look for a coherent API access layer with clear ownership of request construction, compatibility, parsing, selection, deduplication, caching, retry policy, and observability.

Consider capability or version negotiation, typed request builders, filtered stream parsing, bounded caches, request coalescing, cancellation of stale work, backpressure, and diagnostic counters where they solve demonstrated problems. Call out API logic that should move out of ESPHome YAML into testable C++ or generated configuration, while respecting ESPHome constraints.

For major changes, provide a staged path with characterization tests, a first prototype, compatibility behavior, rollout checks, and rollback points. Be explicit when the ideal architecture differs substantially from the current one.

6. Validate the Recommendations

Ground every major finding in both repository evidence and official Immich documentation. Use lightweight local checks when helpful. Do not run a full firmware compile unless the user asks or implementation work requires it.

Where documentation alone cannot answer a question, specify the smallest safe experiment against a user-controlled Immich instance. Never require or expose real API keys, private image metadata, or personal library contents in the review.

Output

Lead with a concise thesis describing the highest-value change to the Immich integration.

Then include:

1. Current API map — endpoints, purposes, filters, permissions, request costs, parsing strategy, and important fallbacks.
2. Documentation mismatches and missed capabilities — each with repository evidence, an official source, affected Immich versions, and confidence.
3. Recommended filtering model — the user-facing capability and the request strategy behind it.
4. Recommended portrait-pair strategy — candidate discovery, ranking, deduplication, caching or prefetch behavior, fallback, and expected request cost.
5. Ranked recommendations — for each item state impact, evidence, tradeoffs, compatibility, API-version risk, effort (small/medium/large), and the first validation step.
6. Phased roadmap — quick fixes, a representative prototype, structural work, migration, and release validation.
7. Not recommended — attractive ideas rejected because the API does not support them reliably, they cost too much on-device, or they provide weak user value.
8. Sources and checks — official links consulted and local checks run or deliberately skipped.

Quantify request counts, candidate limits, buffers, or latency when evidence is available. Otherwise label estimates and state what measurement would confirm them. If the current design is already optimal in an area, say so plainly.