Nextcloud: Open-Source Cloud Apps

As a self hosting afficionado, I feel like the perfect Google photo replacement doesn't exist yet.

I have a synology nas and I use the synology photos app for auto uploading without loss of quality to my nas. Don't forget any picture or videos, deduplicate, figure out what you can safely delete from my phone,... All of that works great and is reliable.

The synology photos app to watch your photos though, isn't very good. Neither on mobile nor the desktop nor android TV. It's bare minimum and even that has failures.

Next cloud,... It gives a weird "I don't trust it" vibe. I want my stuff unedited unaltered, unmoved from their folder and keep your metadata elsewhere, and it just give me a wrong vibe for that. This is 100% feeling and not facts.

Immich is great but high maintenance, any update is a risk that you have way more work that planned. Their upload app need works but I use the synology one. I don't feel safe having that handle the main copies of my picture, and the dev are being super clear that I shouldn't.

Photoprism has been my go to. You need to pay for any advanced features, and unless you're solo you need them for permissions only. I love it but I feel like it's still not quite as good as I would like.

Is there any major, reliable app for that I missed?

The performance issues are noticeable to me because I'm hosting it on a Raspberry Pi 4. I figured that the bottleneck when syncing etc would be network and disk IO so the Pi would be fine; however when I'm syncing, all cores are pegged at 100% by the PHP processes. I've enabled bytecode cache and Redis and all the other normal performance things, PHP itself is just too slow. And I imagine that at least part of the issue is that every tiny file request or directory listing is its own, separately authenticated HTTP request.

But I definitely agree that all the other things are half baked. The media player in the iOS app is extremely buggy. There's jank all over the place. The photos UI is pretty much unusable if you have a lot of photos.

And then there are the constant updates; I get notifications all the time that Calendar or some other app has received an update. I wish they'd coordinate releases of their official apps so that I can get a notification every now and then that I need to update all the apps, rather than constant individual app update notifications.

In short, as you say, everything is 90% the way there.

Well, honestly, Apple is not wrong here.

App Developers usually don't give a flying cluck about anything other than their apps. Battery, CPU, mobile data? Zero consideration.

But then of course the fault lies on Apple (and MS - it's the same thing in Windows - see the CrowdStrike fiasco)

> their focus has been on developing features for business collaboration as opposed to personal & family ones

For people like me, who have to contend with GDPR and NIS 2 requirements on an organizational level in Germany this actually is a god-send. MS and Google don't play nice with the local law, e.g. refusing order processing agreements, although MS has recently started to move on this topic.

We replaced MS stuff (all of Sharepoint, most of PIM) with Nextcloud and MS ADS via SAML without too much of a hassle. The sync client has its nuisances (e.g. can't name Nextcloud instances) and it's getting worse for the last few versions! But it does its job, i.e. syncing, and you can always use the cloud itself.

> I’m confident that the thousands of AWS/GCP/Azure/iCloud security engineers are all doing a more thorough job than you can

I'm not so confident about that:

https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=azure

It really depends on what you self-host.

https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=syncthing

"Do everything" solutions go against the principle of minimizing the attack surface.

EDIT: More is not always better in security. With more people doing more things, the statistical odds of miscommunication and misconfiguration increases.