RFE: Awesome alternative for Google Photo's

[fvzwieten]

I love NextCloud...except for one tiny thing: it's handling of photo's. It is currently keeping me on Google Photo's, which, from a feature PoV, is pretty awesome.

I have been thinking on mimicking it somehow with the help of the new workflow features. It goes a bit like this: When new photo's get uploaded or changed, I have a script that extracts the EXIF tags and creates, based on those EXIF tags, a (virtual) directory structure with soft/hard links to the original photo's.

Nice in theory, but not nice in practice. First, NextCloud does not allow symlinks (afaik). Second, because NextCloud is a replication model, clients have no idea these are actually links en simply duplicate the files client-side.

So, better would be (albeit a lot more work) if both server and clients are aware of the situation. This would mean that the presentation (photos in a folder structure mimicking the EXIF tag hierarchy) is separate from the implementation (which would be in both server and client code). For example, you could maintain a EXIF tag hierarchy structure in the NextCloud DB and generate the (readonly) file structure from there. Clients are served the same way through their access methods.

Client side speed of showing the thumbnails would be key for a good UX. The current situation is very bad, performance wise. I have a photo collection of ~60K photo's and pre-generating thumbs is a nightmare.

EXIF tag maintenance would be outside of NextCloud using the photo management tool of choice. (Although I could imaging an implementation of tag management inside Nextcloud based on the above implementation).

[skjnldsv]

Thanks for this feedback @fvzwieten
Please have a look at the existing issue for EXIF tags: #226

[skjnldsv]

First, NextCloud does not allow symlinks

Not feasible :/

Client side speed of showing the thumbnails would be key for a good UX. The current situation is very bad, performance wise. I have a photo collection of ~60K photo's and pre-generating thumbs is a nightmare.

This is another discussion, there is opened issues in the server repo iirc. You can also use the preview pre-generation app and setup automated pre-generation for better performances

For the EXIF part, head over to the issue 226