Worked well for me. Although all the people I care about had already Signal, Element or Threema installed, so I am not a great pull factor.

And those everyday moms from child care or from wherever can reach me via SMS, for the two messages/year.

Wa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pow!

Nice try mom, but I am adulting now.

I guess you only use the standard Nextcloud photo app, not Memories. It is very comparable to the features you describe + if you have already set up your Nextcloud, there is no need to work with yet another software on your server.

Memories also uses automatic tagging, so searching for tent and beach would probably get you the same result. But I guess they are not using the best recognition software, I get a few missinterpretations here and there. (My marzipan potatoe with googly eyes is not an ‘Instrument’. But I guess it’s a challange for any software)

No special process, I installed Memories as admin on my Nextcloud, pointed it to my Picture-folder and my Smartphone-Uploadfolder, and made sure I had the other Apps as recommended here installed (e.g. ‘Photos’ to use albums and ‘Recognize’ for automatic face tagging)

The Memories-App on the Smartphone is also neat. And it is available on F-Droid.

My picture folder contains 1,4 TB of data, with many RAW-files and some Videos. Memories is handling that without a problem. I especially like the way it handles RAW-files, by grouping them together with the fitting JPEG.

I don’t know about how ressource heavy it is, but my server is really nothing special.

Features I like and use:

• automatic and manual people recognition
• sorting it on a map according to the geo data
• most used: Timeline, sorted by date. I barely organize my photos in folders now, because the timeline-sorting is what I want and enjoy.
• Albums to share fotos with family and friends. They don’t need a Nextcloud-Account to access them.

If you already use Nextcloud, try the Memorie-Extension. It has all the features of Immich. The tagging-feature for faces has been there for at least the year I am using it now.

Isn’t the movie Hancock a bit in this direction?

Can’t get any more GNU/Linux than that, nice.

I started with 30, so not far off. My first step was to try to daily drive Linux. Best decision ever, working with a computer suddenly was fun and exciting again.

It is safer in the sense that, when you selfhost, you have to take care of your own backups. You have to make sure your data is still there, even if two hard drives fail, or your house catches fire and your server burns down. Hertzner is doing that for you.

But you are right of course, from a privacy standpoint it would be much better to have your data on your own server and only send encrypted backups to a remote server like Hertzner.

Here is how I (noobinoob) built my own Nextcloud-Server

• Hardware: I took the old PC from my aunt, no idea about the specs. Added 4 x 8 TB NAS HDD drives and removed the graphics card, the onboard graphic from the CPU was enough. No raid-controller, just connected the hard drives to the motherboard. In future I can add a PCI-Card with more SATA-ports.

• Software: I installed Linux Debian, put my 4 HDD drives in a btrfs-raid1 pool, encrypted them with LUCS, installed dropbear to ssh into my server when it is not started and unlocked yet, installed ddclient to update my domain with my home-IP and followed most (not all) of this guide to install nextcloud. Unfortunately, it is in german, but there are plenty of english intructions out there.

• internet-stuff: I bought a domain (10 Euro/year) and set up DynDNS. I opened the neccessary ports on my router/firewall.

I had to look up a lot of things and failed many many times, but now it works and I am very happy with it - no downtime in the last year. It took about 6-12 months to get there.

In conclusion: Your way (nextcloud on hetzner) is the much better way. You save time and money and your data is more secure.

But if you want to learn a lot of new stuff, building your own server is fun.

It would be easy to unlock the devices for different Software - like ugreen does.

And imagine all the possible backdoors in their software. No one can check, because it is closed source. And this on a device with your most senisble data.

Calling their acting ‘responsible’ is a huuuge strech.

I sold my Synology NAS as soon as I found out, that I can’t change the underlying software (DiskStationManager). It wasn’t open source and the hardware was dependent on that propriatary software. As soon as they decide, that your device is too old, they drop support and you are left with an unsecure brick.

And you are saying the software is open source. Did I miss something? Did something change?

We have those walmart brand equivalents in Germany, from supermarkets like Lidl, Norma and co…

In my world, people who come to the task with a brand new, expensive Makita drill deserve way more mockery than people who come with a cheap, well used Lidl drill.

We should and I will.

That’s beautiful, thanks!

Does anyone know those tony boxes for kids? It’s a box with a speaker, and if you put a little figure (a bit like a playmobile character) on it, it plays an audio book as long as the little figure stands on it.

I really want to build it myself, but I have done 0 research yet. But every now and then a thought plopps up, like ‘I could use NFC tags to trigger the box start playing’, ‘I have an old raspberryPi somewhere’, ‘is it even possible to build a good sounding speaker in this size?’,…

But no time to follow up on those thoughts.

Would you start with big scarry teeth and draw the rest of the monster around that? Or start with the shape and worry about details later?