SSH into your Nextcloud server and follow the instructions below. Fortunately, Preview Generator is highly configurable. Once you add a lot of photos, you’ll notice that these previews eat into your storage significantly (sometimes more than the photos themselves). While the default settings work well from a performance standpoint, they cause Nextcloud to generate a huge number of previews and thumbnails for each photo. Click Download and enable.Ĭonfigure preview and thumbnail settings. From a Nextcloud account with admin permissions, navigate to the Apps section and locate Preview Generator under the Multimedia category. Install the Preview Generator app for Nextcloud.That way, your photos are ready to view as soon as you open the folder. To fix this, we’re going to use the Preview Generator app for Nextcloud to pre-generate previews on a regular basis. By default, Nextcloud generates photo previews and thumbnails on-demand, leading to slow load times. Let’s dive in! Previews and Thumbnailsįirst we need to fix Nextcloud’s preview generation.

There are (2) pieces of software we’ll be using to accomplish this:īoth are freely available from Nextcloud and your distro’s package manager, respectively. The good news is that because Nextcloud is a wonderful piece of FOSS that we’re self-hosting, we can make some modifications to smooth out these pain points. You may also notice that thumbnails and previews take a very long time to load and flipping quickly through a bunch of photos becomes a painful waiting game. Since Nextcloud does not read photo metadata, your albums will often appear out-of-order. Unfortunately, displaying photos is not one of them. If you host and use a Nextcloud server, you know that it’s good at many things. Better Nextcloud Photo Albums with Preview Generator and Exiftool

Exiftool syntax