Sure, if you just want upload / backup it’s not worth it. If your currently happy with nextcloud then there is no reason to try immich.

But I highly recommend to sometimes view old photos to keep the memories alive.

I haven’t looked into the nextlcoud add-ons, but didn’t have a great experience with the ones I tried so far. In general I’m not really happy with nextlcoud even for file sync / share, but I haven’t found any replacement, every thing else is much worse.

Because it has a lot of photo specific features:

• face recognition: enables you to (mostly) automatic tagging of who’s in the photo
• map of images, e.g. look at all the images you have taken in Italy
• (local) AI to search images by keywords, e.g. “sunset at the beach”
• memories: what happened on this day in the previous years

These are just the ones on top of my head, but you’ll probably get the idea. If you just want to back up you photos then nextcloud is more than enough, but you’d probably enjoy the immich features once you used them.

Regarding the two copies: you can use immich on an external library, so you don’t have to have to copies.

It’s like asking why should I use paperless when I can just keep my documents as PDFs in my nextcloud.

But what if you want a graphics of your network and share it with others? Maybe we could make the graphics non stationary, something like a portable network graphics.