Repository navigation
Allow S3 Primary Storage but keep thumbnails/previews local #55639
Description
How to use GitHub
- Please use the 👍 reaction to show that you are interested into the same feature.
- Please don't comment if you have no relevant information to add. It's just extra noise for everyone subscribed to this issue.
- Subscribe to receive notifications on status change and new comments.
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
I am currently using Backblaze B2 as my Primary Storage through the S3 object storage functionality. I have a number of multimedia files that I'm generating previews for. However, those previews are not particularly responsive since they appear to be stored within that bucket as well.
Describe the solution you'd like
It would be great to have a configurable option allows previews to be stored in a local directory while leaving primary storage in S3.
Reacted by Michael Uray, Benjamin Graf, sergewar, sm1000 and Viacheslav Andreev
Activity
CloudCoder commentedon Oct 12, 2025
"It would be great to have a configurable option allows previews to be stored in a local directory while leaving primary storage in S3."
I second this... Video previews are essential for Nextcloud users. It shouldn't matter where the files are stored
Until this is implemented, are there any scripts that will download first few seconds of user's videos from s3 storage, extract a single frame (using ffmpeg), and saving the frame image locally in the user's previews folder?
provokateurin commentedon Oct 13, 2025
@CarlSchwan with the new previews implementation, is this possible?
CloudCoder commentedon Oct 13, 2025
Well I upgraded Nextcloud to Autmn 25 Beta version, ran preview generate -all and restarted system.
Image previews work perfectly.
Still no video previews (.mp4) showing in files app or Memoried app. My videos are stored in S3 object storage.
Note: I'm using S3 as primary storage. I think this why no video previews?
invario commentedon Oct 14, 2025
Were any error log entries generated as a result?
CloudCoder commentedon Oct 14, 2025
Can't remember invario - logs have been cleared since then
invario commentedon Oct 14, 2025
😞 Well, I have PR #55100 pending which improves logging for preview generation for movies. If it gets merged, maybe use that and turn on debug logging to see where the failure is or if it even calls the preview generation routine.
invario commentedon Oct 14, 2025
@CloudCoder Sorry, I should have been clearer. Were any logs generated from the failure to generate video previews? (After you updated and ran
occ preview:generate-all?CloudCoder commentedon Oct 15, 2025
I have now converted all of my videos to .mp4 and replaced the videos on the server with them.
Then ran occ preview:generate-all with no errors in logs.
I added 'preview_max_file_size_image' => 100, to my config.php and regenerated previews but still no video thumbnails?
I use S3 object storage for data directory so no local previews folder exists.
I'm looking into setting up a mount point for the S3 bucket on my server to see if that will allow video previews to be generated on local drive.
HTH
invario commentedon Oct 15, 2025
PR #55100 was merged 14 hours ago into the master branch (hurray!). Were you using an up to date pull with debug logging enabled?
But I don't want to make you jump through hoops for no reason, just trying to help and trying to make sure it isn't a problem with the preview generation code I wrote in Movie.php.
CarlSchwan commentedon Oct 16, 2025
Not really at the moment, but it wouldn't be hard to implement.
That is already possible is to decide to have the previews in a different object store implementation. E.g. minio running locally
MichaelUray commentedon Nov 2, 2025
The current implementation of the S3 primary storage does not encrypt thumbnails and it would be good to keep them locally for security reasons as well since they could contain sensitive data.
There actually was a PR to store appdata at another destination, but it got closed.
sm1000 commentedon Apr 7, 2026
Based on the main request, I will be happy to see a native configuration variable introduced in config.php that allows the administrator to define a custom path for the preview storage, independent of the main Data or AppData directories.
Example:
'preview_directory' => '/mnt/ssd/nextcloud_preview',