Linux has been my daily driver since about 98, and I’ve been successfully using Syncthing for a couple of years for getting photos of the familys phones, but then the missus went an got an Iphone! (And I guess it was time for an upgrade anyway)
In other words, I have a pretty well rounded IT-background, but I’m new to the world of Nextclound, and it would be great to get a little sanity check to see if I’m on the right track to accomplish what I want.
So the main thing is taking care of all the family photos (currently about 160GB). Syncthing works great for that on Android, especially with my setup where I would automatically keep only X months worth of photos on the phone. On IOS however, I have found no clean way to give Syncthing access to the photos.
A problem with this approach is also that it’s cumbersome for the rest of the family to view and organize the photos.
After some research I concluded that Nextcloud may have the best app for both Android and IOS, and the other features and community to be worth investing my time in, and so I have signed up to a hosted Nextcloud provider and started playing around.
I have installed the Memories gallery, and the corresponding app, and after some fiddling, got it working. The Idea is to configure BackBlaze for bulk storage once I get everything set up.
I have two issues I have not quite figured out yet.
- How will I handle disk usage on the phones? I don’t want to upload and delete immediately, that seems both risky and wasteful. I want to upload ASAP on LAN, but only delete from the phone after some time, or when X GB is used or similar.
- How will I configure Nextcloud and “instant upload” optimally for sharing and viewing photos within the family? It seems there are several ways to accomplish this, but I have not been able to find a good guide that explains the options and tradeoffs. The only thing I know is that I want to keep some folder structure, to make it easier to know the origins of stuff. ie, to clean up old screenshots and the like.
So, am I on the right track here? Is Nextclound the best tool for the job?
And if so, maybe I’m lucky and somebody can give me some tips about the two points above?
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Yes, the iOS is the real challenge. Otherwise, you can have Les Pas and call it a day.
Les Pas backup settings looks very interesting on first glance.
Setting up differentiated folders in Syncthing can be a bit fiddly.
But as you say, no IOS :-(
I use Nextcloud only for the sync but I think it is too clunky and it uses too many resources, but I haven’t found anything else that syncs from Android and iOS. After they are sync to Nextcloud I sync them somewhere else for permanent storage. I wish there was an easier solution.
Well, Immich mentioned above, seems to do that.
I don’t know what you mean by “somewhere else”, but would not Backblaze as a backend for Nextcloud cover some of that backup scenario?
I’d say you are in the right track. My family photo archive is more than 1TB and Nextcloud with Memories handles that just fine. Earlier this year I upgraded my home server from an i3-9100 CPU to a Xeon E-2236 (6 cores/ 12 threads compared to the old 2 cores/ 4 threads). That wasn’t strictly necessary, but it did increase the responsiveness of browsing Memories’ time line. Most of all, it increased the speed at which Recognize processed the images for face and object recognition.
One major thing to test, though, is the Nextcloud iOS client. I have one family member with an iPhone and ipad and the automatic upload only seems to work as long as the Nextcloud app is running in the foreground. Apparently Apple doesn’t allow “foreign” apps to run in the background.
Regarding your point 1 I have no solution. Regarding your point 2, you could just use a shared folder with permissions set correctly. But you could also have a look at the Group Folder functionality.
Great answer, thanks for sharing!
I’ll make sure to test on IOS before I put more time into the rest of the puzzle.
I’ll look into shared vs group folders :-)
PS.
How do you handle it when the phone runs full?If you delete after upload, you’d have to download it again if you need it 2 minutes later…
No, unfortunately not. For my own phone I simply clear unused/old photos every once in a while.