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Comment by codethief | Hacker News Reader

Fantastic project!

> No Lock-In

> Memories stores most of the metadata in the EXIF headers of your photos, which means that you can easily migrate to other solutions without losing your data. It also utilizes your existing filesystem structure for organization without converting it to any specialized format

Given that, would a standalone version be feasible, i.e. one that doesn't rely on Nextcloud and only operates on a folder on disk? I mean, while Memories might not lock you in, Nextcloud can still do so. (No two-way sync etc. etc.)

Currently, I just use Syncthing to synchronize all my files across devices (laptop, phone, home server, …) and it works splendidly! Ideally I'd just want to run Memories either locally (on the local copy of my photos folder) or on my home server (on the home server's copy of my photos folder).

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Thank you!

I wrote a bit on why Nextcloud a while back, I'll link it here (see point 5 in FAQ): https://memories.gallery/faq/#faq

As such, Nextcloud doesn't really lock you in; it just provides a framework for the app. You can, theoretically, continue to use Syncthing to sync files while running Nextcloud on top of it (probably not ideal though)

I want to note though, the "no lock-in" philosophy refers more to being able to move out of Nextcloud/Memories at any point if you want. Nextcloud still just stores everything on your disk as folders and files, so you can just decide to nuke it one day and still have everything (not fully true yet, you'll still lose some things like tags and albums; exporting these out too is WIP)

I like the approach taken here. Nextcloud is becoming the defacto open-personal-cloud standard so it makes sense to integrate photos into that. If Nextcloud were getting up to shenanigans in the future I'm confident the project would be forked, and in the meantime I don't expect it would be hard to plug in an alternative backend.

I think for an open-source and/or self-hosted solution to come close to an approximation of google cloud/iCloud/whatever we need projects like this to be able to pick their niche and hyper-focus on it, which leaning on Nextcloud does in this case I feel.

Thanks so much for elaborating!

For what it's worth, I think for people like me (who already use Syncthing and Tailscale), all the reasons the FAQ mention for why Nextcloud is really necessary (auth, file upload, etc.) are already covered, which is why I'd be so interested in something a little bit more lightweight.

(As an aside, I am not sure I agree on the "Nextcloud upgrades are seamless" part – every time I've had to upgrade a Nextcloud instance so far I was in for a world of pain.)

Anyway, I wish you tons of success with your project! :) It might be what will push some of my family members to leave Google Photos and/or Dropbox, and that would be a huge win already!

I agree. I used to use Nextcloud and upgrades were a mess. I missed one once and tried to upgrade and the whole thing went nuclear. The upgrade started and failed, breaking everything.

I found have read the note but how can a dev agree to have an upgrade started knowing it will fail and fuck up the db??. Thank you borg for the backup.

It is such a mess in their container that they could not agree on how to get the real IP being looked.

This is really crappy software.

Syncthing is fantastic and just works (right after you get your PhD in syncthingology because, man, it is complicated when you start)

Another question for your FAQ might be "what is NextCloud?"

So you saved yourself overhead in lines of code by pushing that overhead to people who don't want Nextcloud platform as slow piece of irreparable bloatware.

Please add to FAQ:

Is my data encrypted?

Thank you!

Probably not what you want but I use rclone to mount my hetzner NC instance and have syncthing that points to that mounted folder. It's been pretty hands free solution for me since I don't have a computer at home that's always on. It all started because I didn't want to keep getting sync conflicts with my obsidian notes between laptop and phone.

I'm not sure I'm following: What do you use Syncthing for if on your laptop you mount your remote Nextcloud storage anyway (and presumably use the Nextcloud client on your phone)?

Is that data in the data centre encrypted?

I don't think that Hetzner has the next cloud encryption turned on. So I assume it is not encrypted but when I use syncthing, I can turn on encryption there for the NC node.

But then an app like Memories wouldn't be able to read your files, would it?

That's correct as far as I know.

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