I've been using Nextcloud for some years now. Overall it's an ok replacement for Google Cloud. But for some time now their focus has been on developing features for business collaboration as opposed to personal & family ones. For example, their photo library is quite limited. There's Memories app for Nextcluod, but it isn't much better. I'm in the process of migrating to Immich. Nextcluod notes app on Android has been broken for some time.
As a self hosting afficionado, I feel like the perfect Google photo replacement doesn't exist yet.
I have a synology nas and I use the synology photos app for auto uploading without loss of quality to my nas. Don't forget any picture or videos, deduplicate, figure out what you can safely delete from my phone,... All of that works great and is reliable.
The synology photos app to watch your photos though, isn't very good. Neither on mobile nor the desktop nor android TV. It's bare minimum and even that has failures.
Next cloud,... It gives a weird "I don't trust it" vibe. I want my stuff unedited unaltered, unmoved from their folder and keep your metadata elsewhere, and it just give me a wrong vibe for that. This is 100% feeling and not facts.
Immich is great but high maintenance, any update is a risk that you have way more work that planned. Their upload app need works but I use the synology one. I don't feel safe having that handle the main copies of my picture, and the dev are being super clear that I shouldn't.
Photoprism has been my go to. You need to pay for any advanced features, and unless you're solo you need them for permissions only. I love it but I feel like it's still not quite as good as I would like.
Is there any major, reliable app for that I missed?
> As a self hosting afficionado, I feel like the perfect Google photo replacement doesn't exist yet.
>
> The synology photos app (...)
> Next cloud (...)
> Immich (...)
> Photoprism (...)
>
> Is there any major, reliable app for that I missed?
What about Piwigo ?
They have a mobile client in F-Droid. I've not used it myself, but a friend is happy hosting his own photo gallery with it.
Try Immich (pronounce “image”) in a couple of months from now. At the moment it’s in super fast development, first stable release planned for later this year, probably early 2025. The development effort looks very sustainable, FUTO is funding them a lot.
I still miss editing mostly, but it’s on the roadmap.
I want to like it but it’s quasi-open source. As far as I understand, from the convoluted FAQ, paid Essentials members can’t access the source code, and they are gatekeeping some quite basic features behind Essentials membership.
Reading between the lines I think it is closer to dual licensed. With extra conditions for the non-public source.
I’ve been using Ente for a month and have been loving it so far. The lack of feature parity between iOS and desktop/Electron is a bit frustrating sometimes but workable as I always have a phone and iPad nearby. I reported a bug in the desktop app and they fixed it nearly instantly.
Looking forward to it receiving more polish, but it is workable in the interim. The public e2ee web gallery sharing feature is killer.
> their focus has been on developing features for business collaboration as opposed to personal & family ones
For people like me, who have to contend with GDPR and NIS 2 requirements on an organizational level in Germany this actually is a god-send. MS and Google don't play nice with the local law, e.g. refusing order processing agreements, although MS has recently started to move on this topic.
We replaced MS stuff (all of Sharepoint, most of PIM) with Nextcloud and MS ADS via SAML without too much of a hassle. The sync client has its nuisances (e.g. can't name Nextcloud instances) and it's getting worse for the last few versions! But it does its job, i.e. syncing, and you can always use the cloud itself.
IMHO, the mail app is very slow and need a large screen. Also it doesn't help to manage emails when you need to delete, to search for something, to put in folders and to deal with spams. But I am a power users who like to keep thing clean. Some employees works with it without complaining. Nextcloud recently "bought" Roundcube and it might become the prefered mail app sooner.
> Do you have one NC instance or do you federate (or plan to) ?
We actually have three instances. Currently they are running side-by-side but federation is planned, I think, starting October. Account management is still done in ADS and will stay there for now. SAML works as intended.
> Do you use the mail app ?
Yes, we use the Nextcloud Mail app without the AI features. Most people are using desktop clients, ie. Outlook, for daily work and it is important to us to keep Nextcloud Mail and Outlook in sync. Since the recent changes by MS new Outlook, it is also on the clock, but we are not there yet.
> Which applications do you use to replace sharepoint features ?
We used Sharepoint for centralized file storage, project management, and department sites and not much else. File storage is a given. For projects we moved to Jira some time ago, so little to do here. For department sites we use the Pico CMS integration.
> Do you use the business version of NC ?
Not yet. We are well below 200 FTE, so too small ;) We are interested, however, in the compliance and GDPR certification and we have already contacted their sales. But I don't know what became of it.
YMMV but any issue you have with Immich that may lead you to migrate to NCM you will find again there,IMHO. Update are easier but lots of other stuff are very much work in progress, even when it works well.
My criteria is "when I want to show my vacation to X on the TV at a dinner 6 to 12 months after setup is it reliable or does it always need some tweak or whatever and ruin the moment".
I dont know the apple ecosystem, for me Google photos is king but I want to own and host my data, Photoprism is my current goto.
I would like to switch to Immich, but it is still unclear to me whether my existing directory structure will be preserved or not. In the beginning, Immich used his own structure, which is a no go for any photographer.
But that's only a half-baked one-way functionality, since the set of variables for the template are minimal. Immich can't intake my existing folder structure, or am I wrong?
