I talked several times about how NextCloud upgrade paths are not that easy and how every upgrade has brought some kind of problems.
During these holidays, I finally decided to take the stap and replace it. My NextCloud usage was quite simple:
- Upload important files
- Upload photos for family usage
- Upload RAW files as a small backup
As you quickly notice, I'm not using any of the suite features from NextCloud, and point 2 can be quickly replaced by Immich which now has a stable version!
The file upload part, I tried to replace with a few different options, the best one ended up being Seafile. I loved it, but the only thing I did not like was the way it stores files. They go into a blob format that you can't use any other way than with their software, and it's a hard requirement to move the files anywhere else quickly.
I ended up going with OpenCloud EU, which, to be fair, is similar to NextCloud, but I can run the file upload version without any of the doc suite. Which, hopefully, makes the upgrade easier in the future
Migrating
For Immich, the setup was quite easy. Run the docker, mount the storage path, and setup users. I used Immich CLI to make the migration because it was easy and fast, and I installed the android apps for phone image upload.
The only difference with my previous flow is that now I import the edited photos from my camera using the site instead of uploading them to a folder in the NAS, but since that is not many images and not often, it's totally ok to do.
For OpenCloud I had to mount the NextCloud folder into the Docker LXC so I could copy the files. The API wasn't fast not easy to use, so I decided to go with the quick&dirty option.
In NextCloud, I had everything under "my files" and I shared files with my wife as needed. This time, I took a different approach. All the finance and personal documents are under "my files" as they where before. This is a small folder that never reaches more than 1GB, and it's always synced on all PC's.
Then I created Spaces for RAW images, each space is for 1 person (my photos, my wife and my kid) and they are sorted by year. Only the current year is synced to my editing PC and previous years are on the server only (low-priority backup). These spaces are shared with the owner of the RAW files so they can edit or do whatever with them, but the reality is that I'll do all the processing.
My kid "RAW" files are just JPEG, but he's still learning so I only pick a few images to send to Immich and be seen by everyone, while all the others are kept there for him to look at when he's 18 and instantly delete all of them 😄.
Overall, I hope this setup doesn't change in the next years and fits our needs correctly, but time will tell!