Comment by jve | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jve | Hacker News Reader

I once was complaining about nextcloud photo gallery and someone recommended Photorpism [1]. It has been day/night difference - I wanted a simple gallery that enables viewing my mess of unorganized photos. Yet, for it to be simple on UX, it had to be complex under the hood - has to self-organize based on metadata/AI, duplicate detection, generate thumbnails on his own, etc - and this is what Photoprism is.

Photoprism has superb performance - I have no lag going shifting through many, many photos.

Nextcloud lately upgraded their gallery, but it is still slow. It generates thumbnails on-the-fly. Maybe I can configure it somehow (I tried for v1 gallery but failed). Anyways, Photoprism is great and works out of the box. I like that I can select photos from different folders/views and do with selected photos something (like add to an album).

Moreover things works (Except delete, but archive is OK) for readonly volume, which is handy to mount nextcloud folder.

However a thing to note - you cannot use RPI4 with 2GB to use AI features - at least I had many other services running and RPI was lacking. But viewing photos was still good.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31988575

I recently found nc-photos [1] which also aims to reproduce the Google Photos UX. It does its own indexing so it is a bit faster than the Nextcloud Photo Gallery but probably way slower than Photoprism. The main advantage of nc-photos is that no software installation on your server is required. It just works as a mobile app with an existing Nextcloud instance.

[1] https://gitlab.com/nkming2/nc-photos

> lately upgraded their gallery, but it is still slow. It generates thumbnails on-the-fly

generating thumbnails on the fly doesn't have to be slow. It can be slow and often is as most implementation would rely on something like image magick or similar tool but you can get several order of magnitude faster if you go deeper.

I've spent a lot more time than I would dare to admit on that exact topic while working on my OSS project (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash) and I figured you could build tailored tool in C that rely on say libjeg and leverage very low level tricks like DCT scaling to do things much faster. Typically in Filestash creating a thumbnail takes about 15ms for a picture taken from my camera and it doesn't make a raspberry pi to break a sweat.

Unfortunately nextcloud seems pretty slow in general. Seems like their webdav implementation is quite slow as well.

Opening gallery shows you many images, lets say 40. You can't support fast scrolling if you are going to generate 100 thumbnails per second.

Whereas it works for photoprism. I can scroll fast or open a picture and just hold my arrow and it will shift through the pictures.

Nextcloud has a Preview generator plugin that lets you generate thumbnails in advance. Unfortunately Nextcloud is the only gallery suitable for me because of its groups file access system. None of the other gallery apps have it. If anyone has suggestions for apps with a good access system, please let me know.

Nextcloud Gallery has the benefit of being in Nextcloud with all my other stuff, with companion phone app and syncing and whatnot set up already on my home server. I wish (fully anticipating a "PRs welcome" retort) that it would have more of Google Photos's AI features.

Nextcloud's usual attitude alas is "PRs welcome, but fuck you if you want documentation or help, pay us". Nextcloud burned through several photo/gallery apps that ended up being dropped because of maintainer burn out, and the obtuse and opaque APIs make it really hard for outsiders to pick it up.

(We tried to make companion addons to improve photo metadata, etc. for several years, but eventually gave up because Nextcloud is too awful to work with from a dev's perspective.)

For me this almost completes the use case. The only sad part is that there is no 2-way sync for the mobile apps. It's a 1-way sync, where pics on your phone get pushed to the server but whenever you delete them from your phone, they stay in the server, effectively making you do double clean up. Ain't nobody got time for that.

That is an obvious feature, not a bug! This is so that you can delete images on your phone to reduce the use of absurdly expensive phone storage, while still retain your precious history in pictures on the server.

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