Your photo and video library, at ncspas.northlandcentral.org. Sign in with NCSMFA, the same as everything else.
It backs up your phone automatically, it searches, it recognises faces, it makes albums you can share, and there is plenty of room. It is, more or less, the thing Google Photos and iCloud are — running on our hardware instead of theirs.
Why we moved off Nextcloud Photos
Nextcloud Photos was never really a photo app. It was a file server that had a photo viewer added to it, and that difference showed up everywhere once people actually started using it.
Backup was unreliable. The thing a photo service has to get right, every time, without being asked. It didn’t, consistently.
Sharing was awkward. Sending a set of pictures to someone should take ten seconds and not require a lecture about link permissions.
It was slow. Scrolling a large library was painful, because underneath it was still listing files in folders rather than working from a proper photo index.
Features were thin. Face grouping, search by what’s actually in a picture, memories, proper timeline browsing — a dedicated photo application does all of that as a matter of course.
Immich was built to be a photo library from the first line. Nextcloud Photos was bolted onto something else. That’s the whole argument, and after using both it isn’t close.
Files, documents and everything that isn’t photos stay on Nextcloud, where they belong.
Nothing has been deleted and nothing is going away. Every photo already in Nextcloud is still sitting there, and you still have access to all of it exactly as before. What changed is where new photos go: your apps have been switched over, so your phone now uploads to NCSPAS instead of Nextcloud.
You don’t have to move anything. You don’t have to do anything at all, in fact. Nextcloud holds everything up to the switchover, NCSPAS holds everything after it, and over time that distinction stops mattering.
Setting up your phone
This is the part that matters, because a photo service you haven’t installed on your phone is just a website.
Install the Immich app — it’s in the App Store and on Google Play, and on F-Droid for Android if you prefer.
Enter the server URL before you try to log in. The app opens asking for a server address: https://ncspas.northlandcentral.org. Enter that first, then sign in with NCSMFA. Same trap as the password manager — the app has no idea our server exists until you tell it.
Turn on backup. In the app, go to the backup settings, choose which albums to include — camera roll at minimum, screenshots if you want them — and switch it on. The first run will take a while and is best done on wifi while the phone is charging. After that it keeps up incrementally.
Leave it alone and check on it in a week. Open the app, look at the backup screen, confirm the number of remaining items is zero or close to it. That’s the whole maintenance routine.
A word about iPhones, and what’s coming
Android backup runs in the background reliably. iOS is stricter about what apps may do when you’re not looking at them, so background upload on an iPhone is best-effort: it works, but the operating system decides when, and a phone that hasn’t had the app opened in a while may be further behind than you’d expect.
The practical advice is to open the app every so often and let it catch up. Not elegant, but it’s how the platform works, and it’s the same reason every third-party photo app on iOS behaves this way.
On importing an existing iCloud library: this is the genuinely awkward part. Getting years of photos out of iCloud and into anything else is unpleasant, and the current options are all some flavour of export-and-upload.
Immich’s own roadmap lists “a better way to import large iCloud libraries” as planned — but upstream marks it “Soon™” with no date attached, which in practice means when it’s ready and not before. We’ll set it up when it lands. In the meantime, if you have a large iCloud library you want moved across, open a ticket and we’ll work through it with you. The tools that exist today are fiddly enough that handing you a set of instructions and wishing you luck would be doing you a disservice.
Don’t wait on that to start backing up going forward. New photos can start flowing today regardless of what’s stuck in iCloud.
Using it
Search actually works. Type “beach” or “dog” or “birthday cake” and it finds them, without anyone having tagged anything. It reads the pictures themselves.
Faces get grouped automatically. Name a person once and their photos collect themselves from then on.
Albums and sharing. Make an album, add people, or generate a link for someone without an account. Considerably less painful than what you’re used to.
The timeline. Scroll by date, jump by year, and let memories surface old things on their own.
Two cautions
Backed up is not the same as safe, and the app will offer to help you forget that. Immich can delete originals from your phone once they’ve been uploaded, which is genuinely useful when storage is tight. But it means your only copy now lives on our server. Turn it on if you want it — just turn it on knowingly, and only after you’ve confirmed backup is actually working.
Deleting in the app deletes on the server. It syncs both directions. The trash holds things for a while before they’re gone for good, but it isn’t a one-way archive and shouldn’t be treated as one.
And yes, it’s backed up. In two different senses, which is the part that matters.
Your photos sit on storage replicated between Proxmox hosts at our primary site. A drive failing, or an entire machine failing, costs you nothing and in most cases won’t even interrupt you.
That covers broken hardware. It doesn’t cover the building, so there’s a second layer: everything is backed up offsite as well. Fire, theft, flood, or any other sufficiently bad day at one location doesn’t take your photo library with it.
The distinction is worth understanding, because the two get conflated constantly. Replication means two machines hold the same data at the same moment — excellent against hardware failure, useless against a mistake, since a deletion propagates to both copies instantly. Offsite backup is what protects against mistakes and disasters rather than just failed disks. You want both. You have both.
Storage
You get 100 GB each. That’s somewhere around twenty to thirty thousand photos — or considerably fewer if you shoot much video, which is what actually fills these things up.
If you run out, ask and we’ll raise it. That’s worth stating plainly, because it’s the part that works differently from what you’re used to: on a commercial service, needing more space means a larger bill every month for the rest of your life. Here it means somebody adds capacity. The quota exists so one person’s 4K drone footage doesn’t quietly eat the whole array, not to sell you an upgrade.
You can see what you’ve used in your account settings, in the app or on the web.
Problems
Open a ticket at ncshds.northlandcentral.org, or email support@ncsmx.org — both land in the same place, and the email route needs no login at all.
If backup seems stuck, open the app and leave it on that screen for a few minutes on wifi before reporting it. It’s usually just waiting for permission from the phone rather than anything wrong at our end.
