I need to put some order with the photos I take and I receive with my android phone. Just now I use Nextcloud sync client to upload and Photo/Memories Nextcloud Apps to manage photos.
However, I am not very happy with this setup because of the lack of one Android Application for photos and, thus, the photo gallery of my phone is totally different to the Photo/Memories timeline. And photos are not deleted from my mobile phone when I delete them in Photo/Memories. Which selfhosted photo manager do you think is better to backup and manage photos in sync with the phone?
A second question, is it better to manage the photo gallery with a folder structure or with the album functionality of the Photo application? Which is the best interoperable solution? If I use albums in Memories then I can export those albums to Immich, Librephotos… ? Or I would have to create all the albums again after the export?
This is a great question. The photo ecosystem is one where I haven’t found a FOSS soln that hits all the marks of subscription services. I would focus on whatever helps you search.
I do feel like if files have accurate dates in the file system and in metadata, then folders based on event make sense.
However subscription photo services are very good at automatically sorting - these dates are holidays so these pictures are probably for that holiday. Your home location is here, these pictures are over there so this must be your trip to there. These pictures have these people or animals, so these pictures are about them.
With that comes seamless integration across devices - a picture taken at time now can be seen on a tv or laptop at time +x. Etc.
I have left the FOSS photo world but am definitely interested to see where it is. With digital photography finding pictures is the real trick. using folders like a tag hierarchy at least gets you in the ball park imo. But I have no practical knowledge any more.
Google Photos is a non-starter for me as a backup solution because they scan the actual content of them. No thanks. I know it’s convenient to search for, say, “all photos with my nephew little Richie in them,” but it’s not worth giving them more information about me than they already do.
Well, Google Photos shouldn’t be considered a “backup” solution to begin with. Never mind that both Google and Apple scan the content in their respective services, but there’s just no guarantee that they don’t modify the data on cloud. “Oooh guys, we just invented a revolutionary new photo compression algorithm! Also hosting data is kinda expensive! So pay up if you want your originals.” …and there’s occasional reports that these services just straight up corrupted some old files while no one was looking at them. Good going.
I just treat my Android phone like any other camera I own and use. Copy the files from phone to PC and from there to my NAS, and I use ACDSee’s DAM functionality.
I can highly recommend the nc-photos client for Nextcloud. It’s so much better than the official client, and faster. It has support for the face recognition plugins. It’s missing the file picker intent though, which is a shame. To share a photo, I have to find it in nc-photos then share to the app, rather than from.
This repo may help: https://github.com/meichthys/foss_photo_libraries
Not sure if this helps any, but I found this -> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nkming.nc_photos that has changed my world!
use the dated upload from NC app to your server, then build out your albums and you have the best of both
Thanks for sharing this.
First, let me say I am delighted that such an app exists at all. More people should go and try to make such apps for Nextcloud.
When you mentioned it here, I got really excited, and now I have played with it for about an hour.
It creates Albums, OK. But when you have put some pics into an Album, you cannot rearrange them anymore afterwards. What is the album good for, if you cannot change it.
It does not work together with my way of storing pictures: Because my Nextcloud is for sharing the pics as well as for archiving them, I always have the RAW, sometimes also the “original” JPGs from the camera, then the edited JPGs (out of darktable), and sometimes yet another JPG with reduced size for fast online viewing. This app now shows all of them separately, that is, 2-4 times the same pic, and there is no way of knowing which is which.
You can start a slide show, but you cannot do that from the album view (where it belongs). Only from the single picture view, and even there it is the very last option :-). So you cannot select a range or a selection of pictures for the slide show, because you would need the album view for this. When the slide show is running, I miss all of the usual controls like pause, go back etc.
I have opened a pic from an album, then pressed the “garbage bin” icon, and it has deleted my picture immediately, without asking, and not just from this album, but also from the Nexcloud server. How stupid is this!?! I am not going to touch this app ever again, because of such stupid “features”.
