So I have been using Nextcloud as my primary photo storage for a while now, and the Memories app has been a game-changer (it is basically better than everything else out there). I noticed that there have been requests to provide better visibility to the app, but no official responses, so I thought I’d post here.
From my observations of (mostly ghosting) reddit, the user community is still largely unaware of the existence of such an app, despite probably being the most popular Nextcloud app there is (judging by the number of github stars). On the other hand there are folks including myself who run Nextcloud exclusively to use Memories.
Point is, it would be great to somehow better promote Memories app, which could do wonders to expanding the Nextcloud community. An even better solution would be to merge the Photos app with it, which would fix the Achilles heel of Nextcloud altogether (I have not yet found a case where the Photos app is better than Memories). It’ll help take the maintenance burden off the lone dev too, who I am guessing works on this in his spare time, and be more sustainable in the long term.
Putting this out here for more thoughts from the community and the official team.
P.S. I hope this is the right forum / category for this.
Upvote this one. Nextcloud has done a great job in providing API and support for app development, although not that much to Mobile App than they did to server side app. However, Nextcloud seems to be a little bit hesitated in helping app developer to promote their works, despite a must have app store listing. It seems to me this is a not a priority. Nextcloud has a great app portfolio when facing enterprise users, but that’s certainly not the case for family users. A better developer relaltionship managment is much needed here.
NC does seem to focus on enterprise users, but given limited resources I can appreciate their need for this focus.
I share your desire to see enhanced visibility for SMB, families, and other smaller use cases, since those represent most of the NC users I know.
I wonder if this might be an opportunity to form a group within the NC community for this sort of outreach and support.
I’d outlined some of this with Jos at a conference a few months back, and hopefully will have the opportunity to follow up with him or Daphne or one of the other Nextclouders to discuss how such a community-driven effort can best support the core team.
Not a regular here, but I wanted to chime in to give my support to this. Would be great if someone from Nextcloud GmbH can comment on this, why Memories isn’t already the default. It really takes Nextcloud to another level in terms of usability and completeness.
This was discussed already somewhere else (can’t find the thread right now). Basically the reason is that the memories app takes a different technical route than the photos app. While this route does yield quick wins as we can see, our engineers intend to improve more foundational things in nextcloud to pull off the same features. This takes longer (as you can see), but the hope is that ultimately other apps as well as clients will profit from it.
Besides my comments in the link above, I do want to add that I think this is a very noble endeavor. Pragmatically, though, I just don’t see it happening in a short-medium time frame, simply considering the complexity of features that a photo gallery app needs from the backend, especially to be performant.