In my attempt to move away from Google Photos, I decided to try out Photoprism as an alternative in my Nextcloud setup. However, my first impression of Photoprism was that its user interface was unintuitive, and my family members, who are not very tech-savvy, agreed with me.

Additionally, I discovered that Photoprism lacks a dedicated mobile app, and users are expected to use a Progressive Web App (PWA) instead. This posed a significant problem for us since most of us prefer using our mobile devices to view and share photos, rather than using a web browser.

While Nextcloud's auto-upload feature works seamlessly for us to back up our photos in their original quality, the features available in the Nextcloud Android app for viewing and managing photos are limited.

That's when I found the Photos app for nextcloud. As far as I know, this app is only available for android (no one uses iOS in my family, so this was fine). This app was a gamechanger for us. The app can load photos from nextcloud and I noticed that it was very fast to browse unlike the original nextcloud app.

The features I liked are:

  • Albums and also support for shared albums, which was a big plus for us.
  • Also has a basic support for categorizing and searching using faces, places etc.
  • Has a basic photo editor.

The way I moslty use this with my partner is we have a folder where both of our photos are uploaded automatically by the nextcloud app. Then we point the Photos app to this folder. So any new photos either of us take, it's instantly available for the other person to view. We create albums and with the shared albums support, other family members also can add their photos into the album.

I do miss the insane magic of google photos sometimes where I can search with random thing I can remember to get a photo, but this app mostly works for us seamlessly and solved a major issue for us.

That's when I stumbled upon the Photos app for nextcloud, which turned out to be a game-changer for my family's photo-sharing needs. This app is designed to load photos from Nextcloud and is noticeably faster to browse than the original Nextcloud app.

The app comes with several features that we found useful:

  • It allows us to create albums and supports shared albums, which is especially helpful for our family members who want to contribute photos to a shared album.
  • The app also offers basic support for categorizing and searching photos using facial recognition, location data, and more.
  • Additionally, it has a basic photo editor that we can use to edit our photos.

My partner and I use the app by automatically uploading our photos to a designated folder via the Nextcloud app, which we then point to within the Photos app. As a result, any new photos we take are instantly available for the other person to view. We create albums, and with the support for shared albums, other family members can also contribute their photos to the album.

While I sometimes miss the impressive search capabilities of Google Photos, the Photos app for nextcloud works seamlessly for our needs and has solved a significant issue for us.

Overall, I highly recommend paying for the Photos app for Nextcloud. The app has been a significant asset to our family's photo-sharing experience, and I give major kudos to the developer for creating such a useful tool.