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’ve been using memories for a few months now, but it seems like development is either slowing down or very sporadic. It works, but the app is really slow with the growing number of photos we have on our instance. It takes nearly 30 seconds for the android app to load, the recognise app is using models more than half a decade old, faces aren’t being grouped correctly most o the time, other parts of the app load very slowly, and so on.
Would it be better to move to Immich? It seems to be a highly specialised project which should replace memories. I think it would only create a head-ache of seeing media in immich that is on nextcloud and/or migrating photos and galleries to Immich. But I’d rather not fall into the sunken cost fallacy and move now than in a few years when we have amassed gigabytes more of images.
It would be nice to know if people have switched and what their experiences are, whether the is a migration path, and whether it’s worth it.
It’s like asking on an Apple fan forum whether you should switch to Windows. Or asking on a BMW fan forum whether you should switch to Mercedes. You won’t get an unbiased answer.
I hope the users of nextcloud are less fanatic and indoctrinated than Apple fans. I’m not saying Memories is garbage, I’m saying it’s nice but has issues and dependencies that haven’t been fixed in a while and whether looking for an alternative is worth it. Surely not every nextcloud user is a nextcloud purist.
Why don’t you just install Immich and see for yourself what it’s like, so you can make a direct comparison? Any answer you get here will be influenced by personal likes and dislikes
but back to serious - after year of using Nextcloud as my pictures storage I’m looking for another gallery app.. photoprism, Immich (and the open-noodle fork), LibrePhoto and some more. Immich not without a reason one of the most popular solutions now. ATM all/most of them work well cool and fast for a individual use-case - uploading pictures, creating albums and sharing - everything works nice but once it comes to common picture storage like a family “place shared pictures into one place” most of the galleries don’t have a solution - either it is impossible at all to have a shared storage or other way round all pictures are in one storage and there is no concept for personal pictures storage. Open-Noodle partly address it using spaces but the concept is not satisfying in my eyes because pictures are only linked to a space and remain “individual owned” - once the user decides to take it out of common archive or one of the users is deleted everybody loose access..
I would recommend you try some of the galleries and and test your use case with a smaller subset of your pictures to see if it works well. you can easily and quickly setup above solutions using docker..
Yeah, though it’s not necessarily an either/or question. I mean, he can use Immich for photos and still use Nextcloud for “regular” files, calendars, contacts, notes, and many other features.
Yes, Immich is better, especially when it comes to face recognition and the ability to edit and fine-tune faces. The performance and polish of the UI are also better, in my opinion. But I should mention that 30 seconds of loading time for the Memories Android app is not normal; it takes me 2-3 seconds, and I have about 40’000 photos in Memories.
Ultimately, though, it’s also a question of whether it’s so much better that it’s worth the effort to maintain a separate app for this use case. And yes, I’ll echo what everyone before me has said. Test it yourself. Upload a few thousand photos and install the mobile app on your phone for a few weeks. If it works well and you’re happy with it migrate all your photos over. Or don’t, if you think it’s not worth it. Your decision to make in the end.
Thank you @wwe and @bb77. It looks like I’ll have to test some of the solutions. On my list are now
Immich
PhotoPrism
LibrePhoto
I was hoping to hear some testimonies regarding migration experiences. At the moment, I don’t even know how many photos are on my nextcloud instance because a folder has an & in the name and the photos app fails.
The difficulty in migrating will be the rights and access control. Not all users have shared photos with everybody on the instance and the ownership of photos has to be preserved as well. Maybe I’ll have to write a migration script or something. Maybe somebody already wrote something. We’ll see.
I’d say migration is pretty much either uploading your photos to a new tool, or pointing it at the storage share where your photos are located, and then letting it re-index the library and do its own face recognition, etc.
The actual files and EXIF metadata are relatively portable, and Memories is deliberately designed to avoid lock-in. But as far as I’m aware, there isn’t a generic way to migrate the Memories/Nextcloud-specific state, such as users, shares, albums, face assignments, etc. to a completely different photo-management solution. You’d essentially have to recreate those things in the new application.
I’m in the same situation. I’m currently testing Immich with Nextcloud as the storage backend, using a WebDAV mount directly inside the Immich container. So far, it has been working really smoothly.
It feels like the best of both worlds, Immich’s features while retaining full compatibility with Nextcloud/Memories.
The only downside I’ve found so far is the lack of bidirectional album synchronization between Memories and Immich. I don’t just want to migrate existing albums once, I’d like albums and their memberships to stay in sync in both directions over time.
I’m going to investigate this further, perhaps with a small scheduled worker that compares and reconciles albums overnight. Immich’s API appears to support creating albums and adding/removing assets, so this should be technically feasible on the Immich side.
Has anyone already implemented something similar, or found a reliable way to synchronize Nextcloud Memories albums with Immich bidirectionally?
Pictures are much more than just files - it’s metadata like location, faces etc. Coexistence is nice during transition phase but using two different applications in parallel is always a pain (in every situation) - there will be always some glitch e.g. if you add/delete/edit pictures in one system the other one might lag or completely miss the change. not speaking about meta-data - tags, faces and so one will always remain locked in specific system. I would recommend you choose one, switch and stop using the other one.
no the indoctrination goes even further.