[athrow]

I pay 4eur for 1tb managed NextCloud from Hetzner - it's a good service overall but it's unusable for photos. Apart from iCloud at 10eur per month are there any alternatives with a good photos (viewing, sharing, tagging, ai etc) integration?

[mxuribe]

>...but it's unusable for photos...

Hi @athrow, would you kindly provide a little more info here? What exactly are the issue(s) around photos? I ask only because i've been managing my own instance of nextcloud for years, and had seriously been considering moving to the managed Hetzner approach. (I love nextcloud, but just trying to reduce maintenance tasks that i do every month, etc.) So, any details or experience you would share around nextcloud and photos is greatly appreciated! :-)

[athrow]

Couple of issues:

1) It seems that some movies are placed first in the Photos screen, no correct thumbnails are generated for these. I'm unable to play the vide of these movies (.mov files). This means that when opening the Photos app I'm met with a wall of thumbnail placeholders.

2) It seems that for the photos the thumbnails aren't being pre-generated. There is a wait time until the thumbnails are generated. https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/config...

3) Random error loading of the photos - some photos just don't open and display the placeholder thumbnail.

4) Linked to 1) - some videos appear between photos so I'm getting a mix of photos thumbnails and placeholder thumbnails.

5) As I scroll down the thumbnails are generated so there is a noticeable lag between scrolling and photos appearing. iCloud can generate thumbnails almost as quickly as I'm scrolling so the difference is noticeable.

6) Lack of any AI integrated into the product (face matching etc.)

[mxuribe]

Thanks so much for this! I guess because for my usage, most often I'm viewing photos and videos either via mobile or via my local directory (which is what gets synched to my nextcloud instance)...so i have not encountered some of these issues. But, now that you mention these, i tried a few, and see exactly what you mean. For me, it does not spell doom - though your list is spot on - because as noted i'm not getting hit too hard by most of these. But, this does help me because i am going to try nextcloud via Hetzner. Again, my goal is simply to lessen a few maintenance chores every month...so if i get a few cuts, maybe not so bad; especially since the Hetzner cost is quite fair. Thanks for your help; very informative and I'm very appreciative of your time and attention!!!

[athrow]

No problem, honestly I think for the price it's really hard to beat considering that you get unlimited (subject to fair use I'm guessing) traffic and backups included in the price. Also, supposedly v25 of NextCloud does offer big improvements (including for Photos) - Hetzner are yet to implement this.

[kornhole]

Photoprism is good. Have you upgraded to NC 25 and photos 2.0? It is a massive improvement, and you can use Recognize app for auto tagging your photos using facial and other object recognition.

[athrow]

Hetzner offers a managed product -I'm still on version 24.0.5. The users aren't given the possibility to upgrade or configure the product. For example, I'm not able to turn on the option to create the photo thumbnails.

[kornhole]

I see. I manage my own instance. Hopefully they will get you to 25 soon to see this: https://nextcloud.com/blog/press_releases/nextcloud-hub-3-re...