Setting your preferences

As a user, you can manage your personal settings.

To access your personal settings:

  1. Click on your profile picture in the top right corner of your Nextcloud instance to open the menu

    screenshot of user menu at top-right of Nextcloud Web GUI
  2. Clicking on Settings from the drop down menu opens the user preferences

    screenshot of users Personal settings page

Note

If you are an administrator, you can also manage users and administer the server. These links do not appear to a non-administrator user.

The options listed in the Personal Settings Page depend on the applications that are enabled by the administrator. Some of the features you will see include the following:

  • Usage and available quota

  • Manage your profile picture

  • Full name (You can make this anything you want, as it is separate from your Nextcloud login name, which is unique and cannot be changed)

  • Email address

  • List of your Group memberships

  • Change your password

  • Using two-factor authentication

  • Setting your preferences

  • Choose the language for your Nextcloud interface

  • Links to desktop and mobile apps

  • Manage your Activity stream and notifications

  • Default folder to save new documents to

  • Your Federated sharing ID

  • Social sharing links

  • Nextcloud version

Note

Available options and settings depending on your administrator’s configuration. If you are not able to change the password or the display name in your personal settings, please contact your administrator for help.

Sharing your data in the global address book

Some administrators decide to share their global address book with other Nextcloud instances (so called Trusted Servers) or even with the wider world. This is helpful when two instances want to work closely together, or when people want to use Nextcloud as a virtual telephone book for others to browse. It also allows searching for contacts, creating shares and much more.

You can change what personal data of yours is shared by setting the scope of your data. Clicking on the lock icon will open the following dropdown next to each entry:

screenshot of scope dropdown on personal information form field

If you set your data to Private, nobody but you will be able to see it.

If you set your data to Local, all logged in users within your Nextcloud instance will be able to see the information, but noone outside of it.

If you set your data to Federated, the trusted server(s) which are added by your administrator will be able to see this data, in addition to all logged in users.

If you set your data to Global, anyone can see your data. For some use cases this is wanted. Someone with a public facing role such as marketing or sales might want to share their contact with a wide variety of connections which might not be using Nextcloud.