Hello all,
I’m fairly new to NextCloud. I’m attempting to degoogle my life and setup my own NextCloud server with plans to use it to replace google drive / photos. But, I’ve run into some issues.
First off is Video in my media. From what I can gather researching the problem is caused by HEVC. And NextCloud says the problem is on the browser side not the NextCloud side. But I’m curious, what does Google do to get around this? The same videos play fine on google photos. I’m guessing they are doing some conversion side server side so that the video being watched on the browser isn’t actually HEVC? But then if you download the original video they give you back the original HEVC version? If that is the case, is there any extension or anything from NextCloud that can do the same thing? This is kind of a big thing for me as I do not want to reduce the quality of my videos for storage, but I’m ok if they are slightly reduced when I’m watching them through a web player.
Also another missing feature that I immediately noticed is the ability to search for things in photos. I’m guessing google uses some kind of ai image processing. Does NextCloud have anything like that, or plans to implement it? It’s a crazily useful feature that I use nearly daily currently. When you’ve got over 10k photos (and sometimes those photos are scans of documents or something) it’s really helpful to be able to search for something specific lol.
And then when looking through photos without a search you get to something fairly simple which is the date… My photos go back over 20 years. In Google Photos the scroll wheel give you a simple to use date graph making it super easy to jump to say May 2011.
I’m sure there are other things I’ll find missing, I was just really hoping NextCloud had closer feature parity with google. It was a huge chore just to get the bulk of my photos in. Found a google migration tool but it only imports extremely reduced quality of everything. Downloading google takeout loses all metadata (location, time, etc)… I still haven’t gotten my entire library moved over cause of trying to figure out a way around these issues without having to manually go through all tens of thousands of photos lol.
Next up on the drive replacement side of things. Collabora office. It seems extremely slow. I quite a few different spreadsheets and such that I work on through the web browser usually. There is one that I use daily which is a very basic spreadsheet. Less than 80 rows. Opening this one through the online tool and it takes over a second to respond to interactions / changing cells / etc. There aren’t any super complicated formulas in it or anything to explain why it is so slow.
In the admin office settings it shows Collabora Online Server is reachable and it is configured to use my own server. If I go watch the CPU / memory of that server when opening the spreadsheet the usage doesn’t even really budget, staying under 1% CPU. But given this is in a web browser, I’m guessing computations happen locally so I looked at my local resources as well and again, CPU of the browser never goes over 5%. So it definitely seems like it isn’t a resource issue. Just not sure what else it could be.
I will say, I have seen a similar behavior from Google Sheets before when I was using a Dark Reader add on. The Add on uses css to recolor all the page elements of a page and in a spreadsheet there were to many elements killing the page rendering performance. However, I’ve disabled everything like that on my browser. Yet, the spreadsheet still loads with what looks to be a dark theme. Even if I set nextcloud to use a light theme. So, I’m not sure where the theme is being applied from. Also to note, I tested from a different browser and while it did not apply the dark theme, the performance suffered just the same.
Anyone have any ideas on this?
