Best Practices for Family Shared Calendars

🏷️ General
, ,
1

I have no support/technical question and have seen the support category. (Be aware that direct support questions will be deleted.)

on

Which general topic do you have

THIS IS NOT A SUPPORT REQUEST, ONLY A DISCUSSION TOPIC

I know the limitations of Nextcloud and calendar software in general. I’m looking for advice and discussion from other users on how to manage calendars in a family context.

Context

I use Nextcloud for my family. My instance has 4 accounts for me, my wife, and 2 children. Each account’s primary calendar is shared with all the others, with me and my wife having edit access for everyone. Finally, I share a public link of my calendar to some friends that make scheduling things together easier.

Problem

Whenever we have shared events where some or all of us are participating, I would like to be able to create an event and invite attendees for whoever the event applies to. This works functionally, but is a visual nightmare, as each event appears on each attendees calendar and crowds out my calendar. For example:

Screenshot 2026-05-21 115136
Screenshot 2026-05-21 115136310Ă—201 8.19 KB

Workarounds

Shared Calendar

I have used a shared family calendar that everyone can see that I’ve used for things that apply to everyone. However, this has the downside of events not appearing in my personal calendar share with my friends. I don’t see a way to include events on multiple calendars, other than copying and pasting them manually. I suppose I could make a separate account (e.g., “Family”, “Admin”) that owns this calendar and invite myself to these events. But that sounds like a prohibitive layer of complexity when setting up device client apps (Android, Thunderbird, etc.)

Single Event Owner

This is how I primarily deal with this issue - assign an event to a single owner (usually myself). This is fine, but then family members have to look at my calendar to see things that they are involved in, and things like event reminders may not come through (usually I turn off reminder for other people’s calendars).

Hide Shared Calendars

Another option would be to just hide other family members’ calendars that are shared with me. This hides the duplicated events and gives me a view of my own calendar. This probably would be the ideal workaround, but it is cumbersome to have to constantly be switching on and off calendars every day to get a picture of what is going on with everyone.

Conclusion

So, I’m really just wondering how other people deal with this. I’m sure I’m not the only one in a family/business setting where people have one-off events between various sets of people. I used to have this problem with Google calendar and remember using some sort of plugin that combined identical calendar events between shared calendars (and did some sort of striped coloring to indicate such). Thanks in advance for any insight you might have!

This was cloned from another post that has been unlisted for unspecified reasons:

2

If that shared event would be shown as one (the app recognizing that it is the same even that everybody shares), would fix your problem? And highlighting it somehow to stand out of other individual events.

If there is such a single feature improvement, this might be worth proposing for an enhancement for the calendar app on github. Not sure how this could be done, perhaps just on the online virtualization (that would then not work for external calendar apps).

3

Maybe have one extra calendar for those shared meetings? Since you share all calendars already with everyone, notifications are probably also send to everyone.

4

Yeah, this approach would work for me, though only on the web client, as you say. Android is probably my main use-case at this point, so might be best for me to focus on solutions for that.

5

This was my original approach, but then I realized that my friends with whom I share my calendar wouldn’t see those shared events, only the events on my personal calendar.

6

Looks like this one fits the bill:

7

Nextcloud lets you generate a public link for any calendar you own, not just your default one — the sharing settings in the Calendar app have it for all of them, not just the primary. That means a dedicated family calendar can be public-linked to friends too, which unlocks the whole shared-calendar approach without the attendee-invite duplication. More on how the two models interact: Family Shared Calendars in Nextcloud: Solving the Duplication Problem - Port & Patch

8

Nice write-up! I knew about the ability to share additional calendars, but didn’t want to have to give my friends a second calendar. However, if I put most things there and only private stuff on mine, then I could only give them the shared calendar. Hmm…

This is only getting more complicated, as my son is old enough to start putting his own events on his calendar (and hasn’t been trained as to what goes where & who to share with; because I don’t know! :sweat_smile: )