I use Nextcloud Memories to manage a collection of about 60k photos and videos on a Nextcloud server that runs in a container on a Freedombox server which also has Syncthing running. I take the photos using a Pixel 9a that is running Graphenos. The server, which I access remotely, runs Debian.
I have been using the auto upload feature of nextcloud to copy photos and videos from my phone to my server. It mostly works but there are often days where some of the images on my phone do not transfer, sometimes as many as half of them. I haven’t been able to figure out why or how to make the auto upload copy all of the photos from the phone. When I look at the photos using the Nextcloud Memories app on the phone, I see all of the images on the phone. Those that are not transferred are identified by a crossed cloud icon. Stopping and restarting the file sync process or restarting the phone doesn’t trigger the transfer of the remaining photos. I end up copying them manually later in a batch and then have to go through a tedious process of picking out the ones that didn’t upload. This may be an issue with how I have it set up (I have struck out at finding how to fix that) but I have heard that others use syncthing as a solution for file synch of photos, perhaps because of this sort of problem.
Ideally, I could sync the /DCIM/Camera folder on my phone with a folder /P9aSynchthing that shows up as a folder in the Nextcloud Memories app so that I can see the photos there and, as I move them out of that folder to my regular folder structure in Nextcloud or delete duds, Syncthing would see they are no longer in the /P9aSychthing folder and delete them from /DCIM/Camera on the phone.
Unless that is a bad idea, there are some things I need to sort out.
The first is that Syncthing puts the photos in a folder like /var/lib/syncthing/flrjc-365za with 0644 permissions. It has GUID and UID of syncthing. I don’t see a way to tell syncthing that I would like them to go directly to /nexcloud/P9aSyncthing or whatever that path would actually be for the folder P9aSyncthing I have set up in Nextcloud Memories. Would a symlink from the folder syncthing puts the photos in to the nextcloud folder be a solution or is there a way to get Syncthing to put the photos right into the nextcloud folder?
Would adding photos in this way mess up the database that nextcloud uses? I have copied a few test files into the folders nextcloud maintains and it shows them and lets me deal with them but maybe there is more to it than that.
Another is that some discussion here where others are using it to sync folders into other homelab type packages, permissions end up needing to be changed. I don’t know whether that would be an issue with Nextcloud in Freedombox or whether there is a way to set things up so that is sorted out automatically.
I don’t know whether it affects this process but I am travelling and do not have physical access to the freedombox server. I access it remotely.