It’s great for documents, etc., but I would use something different for photos. Check out Immich and PhotoPrism. I prefer Immich, because it has official mobile apps for Android and iOS. PhotoPrism has an unofficial gallery app for Android, but it doesn’t have sync capabilities. For that, you would need to use a 3rd-party, closed source app called PhotoSync. I think Immich is just the better option.

Nextcloud is good at general cloud features. It’s not specialized in photo management. If you’re storing memes or cell phone pictures it’s fine, but if you use an actual camera that uses a RAW format, you’re much better off using Immich.

I use Nextcloud to hold all my personal and important files as well as my wife and I’s shared photo album. I use an old Surface laptop as a digital picture frame and have it on a random loop slideshow of our pictures album on our Nextcloud.

We use the iPhone apps to upload our photos and then it shows up on our frame. Works really well!

I have no experience with NC, but the sense i get is yes, once you go that direction, you can do a lot with it.

NC itself is discussable, but desktop/android clients are awesome. Autoupload and files preview without download are great features.

I use it, mostly because I wanted to build an analogue to Google Drive/Photos, though it took some work to get it to a point where it felt good. Since the default Photos app feels pretty garbage to me, I installed the Memories app (same thing but better, very like Google photos) as well as Preview Generator & Recognize.

These seem to do the trick. The automated tagging isn’t without its issues (pretty janky, frankly), but I’m pretty content with it to the point where I’m not looking to change in a hurry. Haven’t tried Immich, though it looks pretty enough like I’d probably just go with it since it does the one task it’s supposed to do, but again, I’m comfy and don’t feel the need to find a new home for my photos yet.

I’ve used nextcloud for a while now, but it does suffer from jack of all trades syndrome. I’ve started offloading the things I use it for to other services that do a particular thing better. Syncthing for general file syncing across my devices, Immich for managing photos, Radicale for contacts and calendar sync…

If you’re just looking for an all in one Google Drive like experience for your files though, Nextcloud is as good as it gets.

Custom default settings, speed, and reliability (not IP blacklisted)

Instead of wifi printing, my printer is attached directly to my Pi, then Common Unix Print Server/System (later Rebranded Cupertino Print Server when apple took over the project many years later) acts as printer announcement, driver and spooler service.