I suggest to skip the nextcloud. It’s a mess. Use immich for pictures and paperless for documents.

If hosting some other files that don’t fit those 2 categories, things like filebrowser or copyparty are great. Nextcloud is really quite the challenge tbh and imo not worth the hassle it is for a typical selfhoster… It’s hard to get the most out of it. It pays of for medium organisations maybe but not for just you and a few other people…

To be honest, I don’t really have a use-case for it, because I don’t really need any of the sharing and collaboration features which are kind of the main point imo. The only compelling reason is that I read somewhere that it is a good option to backup mobile devices. I know that Nextcloud is a real beast of a software and there are probably some more lightweight options out there for that purpose.

I never heard about any of those two, but it looks like file browser is going to be archived in September if that is the one you mean.

Yes filebrowser is ending it’s a shame, very simple tool. Copyparty works fine too but too many features I don’t need.

I don’t have a better suggestion for mobile backup. I only have pictures (immich) backed up automatically. Everything else on my phone would be lost or it already sits somewhere else from the beginning (like music)

So your pictures are automatically backed up using the Immich mobile app? That’s probably good enough anyway. If you want to, you can always setup something like Syncthing to get other files as well.

I can imagine. I just skimmed through their Github page and saw the claim:

inverse unix philosophy – do all the things, and do an okay job

These swiss army knives of software can be challenging. But I guess that’s also true for Nextcloud, probably even more so.

Yes, immich sends all my pictures to the homeserver AND I can immediately see all my partners pictures pop up on my phone. Immich is very cool for that.

I too dislike that immich “scrambles” my pictures. I had it quite well organised over multiple decades (folders per year & location), but how well immich works seems worth losing this idea of organisational control over the collection. The immich duplicate detection for example is superb (it isn’t on nextcloud). It for example detects very easily that a 400kb sent or received picture is actually the same as a 4Mb much higher resolution original picture with a completely different filename and different metadata.

I still have my pictures collection organised old school from before immich on various back-up media and the hardest part to me now is deciding to keep that or convert it all to the “immich style” directory… Since it’s now very difficult to add new pictures to it without loads and loads of duplicates.

I did find the setting in immich which will somewhat still organise it in folders per month now, but it’s not the same, since a month often isn’t a logical grouping directory, for example if you go on holiday last week of December+ first week of January: pictures will still be spread across various folders.

My main downside on immich currently is that we can’t easily “share” metadata over a few different users (locations added later, recognised faces etc) although we share many faces/locations in pictures… It’s a hard choice wether I still want to make the few users all use the same account after all because of that (which will have other downsides like no personal private folder)