I need to put some order with the photos I take and I receive with my android phone. Just now I use Nextcloud sync client to upload and Photo/Memories Nextcloud Apps to manage photos.
However, I am not very happy with this setup because of the lack of one Android Application for photos and, thus, the photo gallery of my phone is totally different to the Photo/Memories timeline. And photos are not deleted from my mobile phone when I delete them in Photo/Memories. Which selfhosted photo manager do you think is better to backup and manage photos in sync with the phone?
A second question, is it better to manage the photo gallery with a folder structure or with the album functionality of the Photo application? Which is the best interoperable solution? If I use albums in Memories then I can export those albums to Immich, Librephotos… ? Or I would have to create all the albums again after the export?
AFAIK immich organize photos with albums not in folders. So, If i move from immich to another software (librephotos, photoprism…), the new software is aware of albums? I am worried on organizing my photos every time I change of photo management application.
That’s an organizational issue. I think almost all photo software (except lychee) is more “hands-off, everything internal” because of a few reasons:
If you sync between clients, do you want the software constantly shuffling files around on every device if something is changed in one album?
if you have chronological folders, do you want to make duplicates (double or triple the space) for every album including said picture?
If you work with albums, how do you deal with random folders not in albums?
how do you deal with conflicts of photos being put in different albums on different synced devices?
The solution for all of these is “leave the files where they are” and deal with everything via databases to organize photos. This way you can export or download albums for giving to someone and it will just pull all of the relevant files without having sync or reorganization issues.