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Photoprism

Boris Rybalkin edited this page May 15, 2026 · 2 revisions

Index Nextcloud photos in PhotoPrism

PhotoPrism keeps its library at /data/photoprism/photos/originals, separate from Nextcloud. To avoid duplicating files you can symlink a Nextcloud user's files into PhotoPrism's originals folder, then PhotoPrism will index them in place.

ln -s /data/nextcloud/<user>/files /data/photoprism/photos/originals/<user>

Replace <user> with the Nextcloud username. Repeat for each user whose photos you want to index.

PhotoPrism re-indexes the originals folder every 3 hours by default, so anything new uploaded to Nextcloud will be picked up on the next run. To trigger an immediate index, click Index in the PhotoPrism Library UI.

Replacing Nextcloud Recognize

The Nextcloud recognize app does face/object/scene detection inside PHP cron. On home servers with a large photo library it tends to OOM (blows past the 1 GB PHP memory limit) and pile up stuck postgres connections every 15 minutes via cron, eventually wedging Nextcloud.

PhotoPrism does the same job in a standalone Go process with its own database, so it does not affect Nextcloud cron or postgres at all. To switch:

sudo snap run nextcloud.occ app:disable recognize
sudo snap restart nextcloud

Then install PhotoPrism from the Syncloud App Store and follow the symlink section above.

WebDAV access

PhotoPrism also exposes its originals folder over WebDAV at https://<your-device>/originals/. You can mount it from a desktop file manager, or have Nextcloud's PhotoPrism Services connection sync into it from the PhotoPrism UI.

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