[menthe]

For having used Memories on Nextcloud, and having spent hours trying to micro optimize the Nginx & PHP configuration, I can safely say that, while it is better than the Nextcloud’s native Photos app, this is absolutely nowhere near to Immich, Filerun, or surprisingly even a dumb SMB share (which doesn’t have thumbnail caching…!). I’ve really tried hard, as Immich’s support for external libraries was still in a PR at that time, and didn’t want to have two separate tools to grab files and grab photos.

A big part of the problem, it seems, is that, when you have a large library, and you jump/scroll to a specific year or so, it won’t cancel the previous page(s) worth of thumbnails loading. So as soon as you’re scrolling to search for something, it quickly accumulates hundreds of useless requests that quickly overload the PHP workers, and make everything crawl to a standstill.

I personally had to give up. When trying to grab photos from abroad for my shortly upcoming proposal, I’ve literally deleted Nextcloud/Memories, plopped Immich in docker compose, let it index/transcode/generate thumbnails from scratch against my “external library” (so Immich doesn’t duplicate the medias), and that ended up savings me days of buffering, and was able to find the nice pictures for the occasion!

(R740xd with 48 cores and 96TB SSD-backed ZFS pool)

[radialapps]

It's silly to micro optimize nginx / php when you have docker. Just use the Nextcloud Docker image or AIO and be done with it, everything is pre-optimized.

Thumbnail caching exists (it's even highly configurable), there's absolutely zero buffering even with 100k photos+ on a raspberry pi. You obviously did not read the documentation or install the preview generator (which the docs clearly tell you to)

Your deployment skills are hot garbage

EDIT 3: ^the last line was in response to something that has been edited out of the original comment

EDIT: the comment this is in reply to was edited multiple times. This is pointless and a lot of it is just false.

EDIT 2: (at least currently the previous comment claims unnecessary PHP requests) this only happens if your configuration is incomplete; you didn't install preview generator as the docs say. Secondly it happens exactly once, the first time you see the image. All other requests are gracefully cancelled.

[menthe]

Absolutely was using the AIO image, with thumbnail generation enabled for every formats of my library (another thing you need to manually edit in Nextcloud’s configuration as by default the format list is limited).

And it’s only “pre-optimized” if you are cool with PHP memory limit crashes, PHP operation timeouts, PHP request size limits, and the works.

Another joy associated with using Nextcloud sync is that uploads don’t even seem to support multi-part resumable uploads. So not only is it crazy slow, if there’s any error during the auto-upload of a 2G video clip, or the app is temporally backgrounded by iOS, it’ll go into an exponential back off (which you can force start), and eventually just start the upload for that/those file(s) over from scratch - good ways to waste days burning in your screen while in a trip and trying to ensure your medias are backed up in case you lose your phone on a trip. Try uploading raw images & 4k clips shot on iPhone to Nextcloud using the Nextcloud app + the AIO image from abroad.

I’m telling you, I’ve tried to use them for quite some time, and I’m far from DevOps-illiterate - I’ve been using k8s since it’s infancy, we wrote the original Operators at CoreOS way back.