Hello, I know NextCloud is great but it is not easy to learn, I’m finding out. There doesn’t seem to be a lot detailed documentation.
I installed it on a cloud server. Added a bunch of apps. But I have many questions on how to adopt it to what I want to do (which is to serve as a repository for text and media for a content marketing project). Please, what’s the best way to find answers?
It’s really frustrating to read all the promotions on https://nextcloud.com/ but not be able to get past basic issues. One post I made here wasn’t answered.
Thank you for your attention,
Frustrated newbie
Examples of my issues:
Right now I can’t figure out how to tag photos. Apparently it can’t be done in Photos but have to do it in Files, which doesn’t make sense to a newbie like me.
Or how to bring in thousands of the photos with tags already in EXIF. The tags go into “keywords” (which, as far as I can tell, are not searchable or editable)
hi @alexT1 the best way to learn something is to use it… I definitely disagree there is lack of documentation. In my eyes there are far too many tutorials about Nextcloud which makes it hard to find good ones…
official docs is good starting point:
start with user docs… followed by admin docs…
read posts in this forum - you will learn which kind of issues people hit and if you try to answer the questions you learn even more! teaching is the most powerful learning method because you don’t only need to understand the problem yourself but describe the solution in a way others understand it…
Your referenced post was not answered because it’s very specific… start with something which is more common - store your docs in the cloud, create shares, use calendar, contacts…
Hi @wwe, i really appreciate your reply. I agree with everything you say. The Best way to know a product is to use it.
But also a new user wants to know if some functions critical to their project is there or not before sinking more and more time.
In my example, I need to store thousands of images and to have them searchable by keywords (i.e. tags). I couldn’t get that simple question answered and spent a lot of time trying to figure it out. It is the problem of limited amount of time. If the documentation or community is not there, a new user loses interest. I’m still searching for the right self hosting for my project.
For me it’s not quite clear from your other post whether you want to continue to use Lightroom and just store the files on Nextloud or if Nextcloud should completely replace Lightroom. The former might be possible by using the Nextcloud Desktop client, the latter will be difficult or even impossible, if you want to have nearly equivalent features.
Edit:
I posted a more detailed answer in the other thread, and we should probably continue the specific discussion about Lightroom there, in case you have any more questions about it.
Personally, I think for your need, Nextcloud might be a bit tricky to use. There are other tools you can set up (for free) on your webserver to use it for the way you need it…
Using a tool for something it’s not (yet) intended to use and then to complain about it does not really makes sense to me, sorry. Especially when you do not have that amount of time to read through all the great documentation.
But to try to answer your needs with Nextcloud, tags can be used in the Files section. You can still see bigger thumbnails or you sync it with your device and add the tags locally. The Photos app is mainly for viewing them. Memories might also be an app for you, you can try out.
And: In both apps (photos and memories), you can select the section “Tags” when you added them in the files section.
You can subscribe through a Github account to follow along with these things as the years go on. It is a gradual process overall, with some items ignored and others seeing furious development. This is why Nextcloud is the top open source project for file sharing. Understandable if this is a lot to process, but it is also the nature of open development at a furious pace.
The answer is basically no, the Lightroom specific functionality is not built as feature parity within Nextcloud. In fact, none of the apps offer feature parity with Google Drive or anything else. But, you can check the photo and server repos linked above to confirm for yourself.
I really appreciate all the comments from @bb77@wwe@just@philharmonie Gosh. I got so much attention. Now I feel embarassed I complained about lack of community here.