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
I am new to NextCloud. I am experiencing some issues and trying to leverage this community site for reference, however, it seems that every topic I search returns threads from people who have the same issuesā¦but the threads are always closed (after 90 days) with no useful responses. As a result, I can never find solutions or join the thread to say that I am having the same issue. I have never seen a productās community site that closes threads like this. I have found zero solutions to my issues. Instead of a usable knowledge base, I found 30 people asking the same question with no solutions.
Also, Iām not sure what this disclaimer even means that I have to select in order to post. Am I stating that I have no support question on a support website? Huh?
Hey @mikebenton welcome to the nextcloud community
if you have an issue, create a support issue, complete the Support template. Please use this when you request support, remembering that the community forum is a community of volunteer enthusiasts helping and supporting fellow users. the community has a huge knowledge base and some clued up folks who gladly share their knowledge and expertise in the spirit of open source. community support is not affiliated and in no way obligatory!
you certainly got that rightā¦ obviously this is not a support question but a ārantā about this forum?
so do you want to keep us guessing what you were looking for?
In the past, we have seen many topics being hijacked that were not really related (completely different versions, different OS, ā¦). So we have started closing systematically old topics.
If you have a problem that has been there before and you still have it, you can open a new topic, and link the 30 other topics there. Compared to old cases, you say, I have my problem here in version 33, but similar problems were already reported in earlier versionsā¦
And in the linked topics, there is also a notice that the topic was linked from other topics, so people should find all the cross-references. Just the people in the old topics wonāt be automatically notified.
Ok, thank you. I will withdraw my suggestion that topics not be auto-closed. The request only came from the fact that I saw many folks with the same issue as me, but no solutions. I would just see the same thing - this has been closed due to inactivity (90 days). To me, that just meant whether it was the original author or someone else, the solution only had 90 days to make it. Folks are not going to open a new topic just to post the solution.
In any event, I digressā¦.I have since concluded NextCloud is not the best solution for photos browsing (20k+). Iām happy to share some of the reasons:
Only a small portion of the thumbnails are making it to my devices (but they all work fine on the website). I have tried 4 separate devices - all with the same result.
Photos on the devices are sorted by the modified date for the 200-ish that actually make it to the device, with no option to change. I have photos from 3 years ago showing as my most recent.
You can view metadata on the device, but not on the website. The website has āSidebarā, but for some reason it doesnāt display metadata. Weird. This image appears on my phone with 2/17/2026 date (modified date). When I view the metadata, the correct date is present. In fact, it says thereās no date informationā¦.and then displays the correct date:
I intended to use NextCloud to blend my libraries - iOS photos, digital camera photos from before my iPhones, and scanned photos from before digital cameras. If I want to view an image from 1997, Iām going to spend 2 years scrolling. This is the main reason I feel NextCloud is not a good browsing solution.
Thereās no search feature. Again, all I can do is scrollā¦and hope that one day I came across the picture Iām looking for.
Iāll keep an eye out for future releases that resolve these issues. I still intend on using NextCloud to store my files and sync my phone. Iām just going to install Immich for organizing/browsing. Itāll be setup in read-only. If/When the features become available in NC, I can just shut down Immich.
If the main issue for you is navigating a large photo library (for example jumping between different years), you might want to try the Memories (Nextcloud app) app.
Many users with large photo collections prefer it over the default Nextcloud Photos app because it provides much better browsing controls and timeline navigation.
One of the biggest advantages is the timeline view, which allows you to quickly jump between years instead of endlessly scrolling through the entire library. For example, you can immediately move from something like 1997 ā 2005 ā 2018 with just a few clicks. This makes browsing mixed libraries (scans, old digital camera photos, and modern phone photos) much easier.
Another very useful feature is that Memories allows editing EXIF metadata directly from the web interface. This means you can correct or add information such as:
date and time (Date Taken)
GPS location
others
This is particularly helpful when importing older photos or scanned images that either have missing metadata or incorrect timestamps. Fixing the EXIF date once will also improve sorting and timeline navigation across the library.
For larger libraries like yours (20k+ photos), Memories often provides a much smoother browsing experience while still keeping everything inside the Nextcloud ecosystem.
Of course, Iām not sure whether you are already using this app or not, so if you are and these things still donāt help in your case, feel free to ignore the suggestion.
That said, this discussion is already getting quite off-topic from the original thread, so if you would like to explore this further or discuss photo-management workflows in Nextcloud, it would probably make sense to open a separate topic so the conversation can continue there.
