Sharing and grouping photos from holidays - consistency and storage-awareness

Hello!

I have a question regarding how to handle a situation like this:

  • During my holidays, I take a lot of pictures, and the same goes for my family.
  • We all have the mobile Nextcloud app, which instantly syncs our photos to the InstantUploads folders in our respective accounts.
  • After the holidays, I would like to create a shared album containing most of the photos, preferably grouped by the person who took them.
  • Additionally, I want to create a “file drop” link for people who don’t have an account on our Nextcloud instance but took pictures on the trip.

Ideally, I would still like to keep all my photos in my InstantUpload folder, but also have some of them in a subfolder within a shared directory. The problem is that if I copy these files from InstantUpload, it results in wasted storage. Even if I move them using the web interface, the mobile app will sync the moved files back to InstantUpload, causing further storage waste.

I attempted to move the files directly in the filesystem and then run occ files:scan. I noticed that this method doesn’t trigger the app to re-sync the moved files. But in doing so, I have the issue of photos from the same trip being in two different locations. Furthermore, moving files directly without GUI access is inconvenient.

It would be best to have the ability to create a “Virtual folder,” preferably using hardlinks, which could be created based on the file selection through the web GUI. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find such a feature.

Lastly, I am aware of the concept of “Albums” in the Photos app. However, the Photos app itself is quite buggy and lacks many advanced features such as link-sharing.

I would greatly appreciate any suggestions or workarounds for efficiently managing and organizing photos in Nextcloud. Thank you!

You didn’t state what version of NC or Photos you’re using so it’s challenging to respond with any specifics. Photos has evolved significantly in the past twelve months, but what you have access to will depend on versions:

Also, you have you explored some of the third party Photo/media related apps to see if some of them are better suited to your preferences? Memories is a popular one, but certainly not the only one:

https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/memories

I’m on NC25, the Photos up is really buggy. I’m experimenting with the Memories and it feels far more superior. Nevertheless, it doesn’t allow to create shareable albums, unfortunately.