Add the recommended Imaginary micro-service to optimise Photos thumbnail loading speed (which is painfully slow right now)

[marcusquinn]

• https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/24/admin_manual/installation/server_tuning.html#previews
• https://github.com/h2non/imaginary
• https://github.com/h2non/imaginary#scalability

[girish]

Interesting, I guess this provides optimizations over imagemagik. There hasn't been any release since 2 years though - https://github.com/h2non/imaginary/releases/tag/v1.2.4 . I am not sure why nextcloud offloads basic functionality to some externa project of unknown maintenance state

[vladimir.d]

By default, Nextcloud generates photo thumbnails on-demand that leads to slow Photos thumbnails load. To speed it up we’re using the Preview Generator app for Nextcloud to pre-generate previews regularly.

First we set the default thumbnail sizes by using the "occ config" commands:

sudo -u www-data /usr/bin/php /app/code/occ config:app:set --value="32 256" previewgenerator squareSizes
sudo -u www-data /usr/bin/php /app/code/occ config:app:set --value="256 384" previewgenerator widthSizes
sudo -u www-data /usr/bin/php /app/code/occ config:app:set --value="256" previewgenerator heightSizes

Then we generated previews for all existent images:

sudo -u www-data /usr/bin/php /app/code/occ preview:generate-all -vvv

It took about 3 weeks on our host to generate preview images for 4Tb of data which takes additional 500Gb.

Once it's finished we setup a cron job to generate previews:

0 */6 * * * sudo -u www-data /usr/bin/php -f /app/code/occ preview:pre-generate

TBH, it helped us a little but our Photos are still loading for 50-60 seconds and we are seeking any solution to speed it up.