zlacker

Does your phone silently and reliably upload all the photos to your server? My guess you're conceding on that part.

How's the offline app support? My full library (30k items) is available on my phone (not in high res). There are a lot more concessions I'm sure.

>>halapr+(OP)
I’d gladly trade manual but bulletproof sync over paying a fee forever for essentially… storing files on drives.

We got to this stage of having to sync because Apple can’t stand putting more storage on client devices.

>>halapr+(OP)
Yes, it does silently and reliably upload all my photos to my server. That's like, the entire selling point of the app? You even have control over how and when (on wifi or not) and the ability to change hostnames depending on what network you are on. And yes I can browse my entire collection back to 2001 no problem. I have no idea what the offline support is.

>>vachin+D
> We got to this stage of having to sync ̶b̶e̶c̶a̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶A̶p̶p̶l̶e̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶’̶t̶ ̶s̶t̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶p̶u̶t̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶m̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶s̶t̶o̶r̶a̶g̶e̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶c̶l̶i̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶d̶e̶v̶i̶c̶e̶s̶.

"because a company that sells you Cloud storage has very few incentives to give away more local storage, or compress/optimize the files generated by its camera app." might be more accurate

>>halapr+(OP)
The sync really is quite good. On wifi it's basically seamless. If I had 30k new images though it would be much faster to use the immich-go tool mentioned in the blog post.

Offline support is alright, though I haven't worried about this much. I think it doesn't do any local deletion, so whatever stays in your DCIM folder is still on device.

>>halapr+(OP)
The offline sync was a bit problematic in the past but this year they finally got it working properly.

>>vachin+D
More device storage wouldn’t help. I couldn’t fit all of my pictures on any phone sold today.

>>WD-42+V
That was my selling point for Nextcloud, and it turns out it doesn't work reliably. It works most of the time, but for backing up photos it's not enough, and when it fails it's super annoying (you have to resync EVERYTHING from scratch).

People seem very happy about Immich, I'm tempted to try. But people seem very about Nextcloud as well, so it's difficult to tell.

>>andrew+A6
> The sync really is quite good.

Do you have to ever open the app though? On iOS/Android?

In my case I would need it to run on the phones of my family members, and they probably will never open the app.

>>vachin+D
> We got to this stage of having to sync because Apple can’t stand putting more storage on client devices.

It's not why I use sync services. All my photos fit on my devices (more or less). But I want to have seamless access to my files from both of my devices. And most importantly the sync is my first line of backup, i.e. if my phone gets obliterated I don't loose a day or two of files and photos, I only loose a couple of minutes.

>>palata+Gi
iOS doesn't allow that sort of pattern for non-Apple applications last time I looked, so probably doesn't work on iOS at all.

>>Jnr+K8
Can confirm, they put in a ton of effort to fix it and they delivered. Flawless on ios since many versions ago.

>>embedd+2D
The Nextcloud iOS app does it. For some reason it requires the location permission "all the time" for that, presumably as a way to "wake" the app from time to time?

I decided to try Nextcloud exactly because of this. My problem with it is more that the whole thing is a bit unreliable. Like once in a while the app will get into a state where the only way I found to recover is to just erase everything and re-sync everything. And the app will resend ALL the pictures, even though they are already on the server.

And I can't do that with my family members' phones. It doesn't matter to me if the app takes a month to sync the photos, but it has to require zero maintenance. I can deal with the server side, but I need it to "just work" on the smartphones.

>>palata+Ai
Nextcloud is dogshit.

Immich is the best end user focused app I've ever ran in a container.

>>palata+hE
> The Nextcloud iOS app does it.

Searching for "nextcloud ios background sync" shows a whole bunch of forum posts and bug reports about it not working well unless you have the application open.

One issue (https://github.com/nextcloud/ios/issues/2225) been open since 2022, seems to still be not working properly. Another (https://github.com/nextcloud/ios/issues/2497) been open since 2023.

For something that works well it seems like a ton of people have a lot of issues with it. Are you sure you're on the latest iOS version? Seems like people experience the issues when they're on a later version.

>>halapr+(OP)
> Does your phone silently and reliably upload all the photos to your server? My guess you're conceding on that part.

That’s my question. I’m sure it works fine on Android but I was under the impression that iOS/iPadOS restricts this unless the app is running in the foreground.

>>embedd+TL
Background support for non-Apple apps is best-effort at best, and explicitly discouraged in the docs. The rate of silent push notifications and other background mechanisms are intentionally not documented and you’re explicitly instructed you not to rely on any current behavior. They make some exceptions to support money makers like Uber and fitness tracking but generally they don’t like you using anything in the background.

Android is more relaxed but the vendors (like Samsung etc) will go around that and implement their own aggressive background killing bots. Sometimes, this causes alarm apps to stop and not wake you up etc.

The main reason is battery life. Tragically, this makes sense due to the cesspool of spam apps that plague their ”curated” app stores. If you’re an app developer who want to use it responsibly you’re in for a world of trouble. I know because I am one of them (well, I consider myself responsible at least).

>>embedd+TL
I don't know it for sure, but I think it wasn't working until a recent update (like 6 months ago). Also an unintuitive thing is that the location permission has to be given to the app "all the time", and I think I had to manually go into the settings to set it up.

I think that the forum posts may be old, and/or a bunch of them may come from users who did not know that they had to set the location permission this way (which admittedly is unintuitive for photo syncing).

>>klabb3+oy1
The Nextcloud app has been running and syncing in the background on 3 iPhones for like 6 months, so they managed to make that work relatively well.

My issue is other bugs that make it painful, including the fact that I cannot trust that Nextcloud will eventually upload the whole photo gallery (it seems like some files regularly get "locked" w.r.t. "webdav", for some reason, and this never resolves).

>>esseph+iF
I find it harsh to call it dogshit. My feeling is that they focus on other use-cases than photo syncing.