I prefer SyncThing on both mobile and desktop devices. It's open source and mature, the server only makes devices findable between each other. It allows 1 or 2 way sync. And it has advanced settings for keeping removed files (e.g. trashbin that cleans anything older than X days.)
I found that SyncThing is not a great solution for the "mobile photo reel" use case. I want my entire photo collection to be easily searchable & accessible from my mobile device, but I don't need a complete copy of my photo reel to be saved to my device. I want to be able to delete things from my phone to free up space, but I want them to still exist in my photo collection that is backed up to the cloud.
+1 syncthing too. Over the years it has gotten rock solid for me. I use it between all my machines and phone. With various 1 to many, 1 to 1 and one way or two way sync.
One of my machine is always on and is backuped to the cloud everyday. Effectively making a backup of all my devices at once.
Better yet, since syncthing can also save staggered copies of modified files, a rm -rf * will be synced but the backup machine will still have copy from about 10s ago. This saved me a few times.
Once I realized that I had deleted a file a few months later. And I found it into the syncthing backup, itself within the cloud backup.
I just finished setting up an automated backup system with syncthing and restic, and now my phone, laptop, desktop and server are all backed up in several directions and to a cloud storage area, every night. It's glorious and works like a dream. Happy days!
Since this is upvoted so much, I wonder what people's complete setup is for something like this to replace, say, Google Photos. So once the photos are on a "server", what do people recommend for albums, sharing, metadata, geotagging, search, etc?
I'm not sure it covers all your features listed, but I use PhotoStructure [1] for the 'album' side of things. It's been mentioned a bit on HN, which is where I found it. Sharing is very open for me since I'm just sharing wholesale with family, but when I need to share specific images or albums to people, I usually do it via some other way that suits them -- so if they use messages, email, google drive, dropbox, or just want to download from a webpage (eg. caddy), I'll enable that.
I want an easier way to edit the comments on photos (as embedded metadata) that I haven't found yet. Any image browser where I can hit a convenient hotkey, type "Summer 2023 at the river with cousins X and Y" and move on would be great. If anyone has a suggestion I'm listening keenly! If this is built in to something on MacOS or a linux default desktop (like KDE or something I'm less familiar with), or is a small paid non-subscription app, I would buy it.
I use https://github.com/jpsim/AWSPics , which takes care of everything. It's great IF you're comfortable with your whole photo solution being cloud-based (but you still own and control it, you're not just handing it all off to a SaaS), rather than being self-hosted. Personally I prefer the former these days, but I know that I'm in the minority here on HN.
With AWSPics, sync your photos (just a simple directory tree on your local device) to S3 (I just do it manually from time to time from my desktop, but no doubt it can be done automatically at regular intervals, and/or it can be done directly from a phone), then Lambda functions generate thumbnails and browsable galleries (as static HTML), then you can view it all via CloudFront (password-protected using Origin Access Identity).
AWSPics isn't really being actively maintained these days. But it still works fine for me. The setup is cheap, you basically just pay for the S3 storage (currently costing me a bit under $1/month - and I guess you could use a cheaper S3-compatible alternative like Backblaze and reduce your costs further). No server to set up or maintain. Durable backup built-in. Fast reliable CDN built-in.
Photoprism and piwigo seem to be the most used for self hosting. Haven't tried either but slowly making the self hosted move and these were on my research list.
You don't. I currently run this setup and it's more for people who want to "definitely degoogle" more than they want feature parity with photos. This app is awesome, I intend on contributing if they need it, but it looks solid.
I have a Synology NAS and it has a Photos app that is essentially a Google photos clone. It has face recognition, tags, albums, auto backup from phone, etc.
Works pretty well, although I wasn't seeking it out or researching other options
I personally still use and pay for Google photo. Mostly because I am lazy finding a better solution. As google photo UI is becoming worse overtime, I wouldn't mind an alternative though.
Syncthing + Tailscale. I have it set to only accept syncs from the tailscale addresses. I use this to do voice recordings that fairly quickly sync home for records of conversations.
I'm unclear if Syncthing inherently encrypts transfers, but layering it within Tailscale would add that. No?
> All device to device traffic is protected by TLS. To prevent uninvited devices from joining a cluster, the certificate fingerprint of each device is compared to a preset list of acceptable devices at connection establishment.
So yeah, transport is encrypted. I do believe they need to put that fact front and center, though. It took me a few minutes to find out. (Thanks for making me find out, though! I use Syncthing heavily and it never occurred to me to even question this.)
+1 for SyncThing. It (now?) works effortless on my phone and having your screenshots and snapshots automatically on your NAS and PC to process them there is fantastic.
Didn't use the "rolling trashbin" feature yet but need to look into that
I use the File Explorer Pro App on iPhones and iPads to occasionaly backup all the albums to a NAS. It also has many other useful features i use from time to time.
This doesn’t answer your question directly but iCloud is definitely not the way. Not only it’s unreliable and unusable largely, it is also designed in a way that discourage interoperability.
On Mac (I am aware you have said Windows) So if I were you I’d just dump app the photos locally in normal folder hierarchies (yes drag and drop; not going hunting in Library folder) and then backup wherever you want them. Here’s something https://support.apple.com/en-in/HT205323. Googled it. Absolutely no idea whether it works or how.
Then put something like Dropbox on the job on iOS and it’ll keep uploading your pics and videos which will show up inside one folder on your Windows as well.
My point is — you can’t rely on iCloud after you setup your backup up sync strategy. So get all your data at one point then start your parallel backup/sync setup (and maybe leave iCloud on as well if price is not a concern).
I was able to backup my iPhone photos (stored on device) to Window using Dokany, ifuse and rclone. This have one caveat though: if you are using iCloud, some of your photos are actually stored as low resolution copies of the original to save space on your device, so original will be not backed up.
I wonder if these services will ever reach mass adoption.
I consider myself to be technological advanced, but other than niche photographer, i wonder if 99.99 % of population would ever go through the effort of setting such a service ?
I dream of selling a Box that plugs into the wall that backs up all of your photos and videos and maybe acts as an ActivityPub server, and you can add your friends who also have a Box, and your friends' Boxes back up all of your photos and vice versa.
The added benefit of integrating federated social media is that if you want to share a file with your friends, there's zero load time because the file is already backed up on their Box, or it's striped across multiple Boxes and downloads quickly.
It would have to be dirt cheap though, like a Chromecast.
AFAIK you can use SyncThing-like utilities, like Möbius Sync, on iOS, but not for photos, because… iOS does not consider a photo a file. Which is baffling (probably for some security reason), so I have to stick with a USB cord and ifuse + heif-convert on Linux.
Yep, backing up phones (without using cloud, if you don't trust it, and I don't) is a pain... syncthing solves this, by syncing all the photos (and other files you want/need) onto a pc/server, that you can then back up using other solutions.
Something is absolutely unavailable on iOS. All these other apps I’ve tried just don’t work. I think it’s that mobile operating system’s problem. Probably the devs don’t want to play a game that they know is rigged.
The recommended spec is 4 cores and 6GB. Running this 24/7 for a year in US where the carbon intensity is about 400 gCO₂eq/kWh would produce about 150kg of CO2 per user per year.
I appreciate the intent of this project, but it is not a sustainable approach.
If you are taking a couple of pictures a day, you only need to run this service for a couple of minutes per day, the rest is wasted. With Google Photos, as a SaaS, users are sharing computing power and each users are emitting less CO2.
>If you are taking a couple of pictures a day, you only need to run this service for a couple of minutes per day, the rest is wasted.
You can configure your server to sleep (scheduled or use WoL), which will halve (or more) that carbon emission number.
Speaking of which, individual action will never approach the level that corporate action could. Take a look at the practice of gas flaring (2022 estimate of ~357 million tons CO2) which is about ~45kg/person on earth. Changing flaring to capture will have a bigger impact than a minisucle fraction of the population not running a server.
But profits trump everything, so I guess we're stuck shaming individuals instead.
Turning a service on/off makes a lot of sense for this kind of application.
I sincerely didn't post my comment to shame anymore.
Need for computing is growing fast and it is actually not negligible at all. See the link below, data centers emitted 300 MTCo2 in 2020, similar to the number you mentioned.
I don't understand how or why this defeatist, nihilistic attitude is growing in popularity. Do people just lack the self awareness to realize their inaction is tantamount to malice?
If you are running the machine anyway to do other tasks like backing up and running Jellyfish then it might be worth it.
How did you get to 150kg of CO2 per user? I'm going to assume you mean each person has one instance rather than sharing an instance like a family would. So thats 375Kwh per year, which works out as drawing 42W. That seems rather high to me.
I'm hoping to try and run this on my Pi4 which idles at under 1W. You could run on a Macbook M1 which only under heavy load conumes 42W, but I doubt this is going to need consistent heavy load: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
My personal server is a 9900K with 64GB ram and normally around 35 various docker containers running on it. It's very rare to see it ever above 10% CPU utilization.
For example, I host between 5-10 minecraft servers for my kids, but they sleep while the kids aren't playing on them and only spool up when a link is requested.
A properly configured Linux box would barely need a trickle of energy when nothing is demanding its resources, so I'd guess that the estimates are likely a bit on the high side.
For perspective, this is about half the CO2 that you will exhale in a year of normal breathing. For similarly useful environmental tips, try not exercising as much - wouldn't want to increase rate of exhalation!
> I appreciate the intent of this project, but it is not a sustainable approach.
Self-hosting anything isn't sustainable. Even your modem or router isn't sustainable. But having additional backups and privacy is worth something for me. However since I'm in Europe, electricity prices here are through the roof and I try to minimize power where possible. I self host Immich on my Intel Celeron J1800 NAS that uses 19.1Wh on average. I cannot run any ML stuff that it comes with though. But for me the carbon intensity should be about 250 gCO₂eq/kWh [1]. So running my NAS produces about 42 Kg of CO₂ per year for 2 users [2]. Including 10 or so additional applications besides Immich. That sounds pretty reasonable to me.
First, do you suppose it's running at full pelt 24/7? If suggest the specs are that high to speed to batch operations. Most of the time it'll be idling.
And second, letting Google or Apple manage this doesn't mean it doesn't use energy. They're offsetting or generating? So am I.
You should write it as how much it adds to electricity bill, not in kg of CO2.
Kg of CO2 is a unit of fearmongering. And if you believe it's not, then the problem is why people are allowed to buy electricity so cheaply, not a photo-sync service.
By the way, a cow produces 120Kg of methane a year.
My "backup routine" consists of storing photos in iCloud, which is then syncronized "real time" to a local Mac Mini.
From the Mac Mini i then run scheduled backups to a local external harddrive, as well as a local Raspberry Pi running Minio, and nightly to OneDrive.
The external harddrive backup uses Timemachine, the raspberry pi backup uses Kopia, and OneDrive is done with Arq.
Furthermore, i make yearly archive discs. Identical copies on M-disc Blu-Ray media, stored in geographically different locations. Each disc contains the photos that have changed in the previous 12 months, and no encryption/archiving is used.
Alongside the M-disc media i keep a couple of external harddrives that contains the entire photo library. These are checked (with badblocks, non-destructive surface scan) yearly, updated and rotated when storing the new M-disc media.
The default setting for iCloud Photos is non-e2ee, which allows US federal police access to every photo you have ever taken or saved without a warrant/probable cause.
The photos also likely have EXIF GPS data and timestamps, so it's also a track log of location history.
> which allows US federal police access to every photo you have ever taken or saved without a warrant/probable cause
I'm aware of that, though it's no different from any other US based cloud provider. I am however a citizen of the EU, so there's the EU/US safe harbor (or Schrems II) agreement in place.
In the end it all comes down to trust vs convenience. I trust Apple more than Amazon or Google, and about as much as Microsoft. Apple keeps my data on EU soil, and is a lot more convenient on Apple platforms. Microsoft sends all OneDrive data to the US.
I do however use Advanced Data Protection for iCloud, which e2e encrypts photos and others. All backups, including local ones, are source encrypted.
When i was a kid, photos came in physical form, both as prints and as negatives. These could be stored in different locations, although most of the time they would be stored in the same location.
These days it's all digital photos, and i think most people agree that some kind of backup is needed. If you primarily use a cloud service, there is probably little risk that your data suddenly vanishes (though it has happened), but instead you're faced with the danger of losing access to that account, meaning your stuff might still exist, you just no longer have access to it.
My "normal" backup routing is simply "iCloud -> Mac Mini -> external harddrive + OneDrive", and the Raspberry Pi and Kopia is a (long running) test to eventually replace time machine.
As for the M-disc archive, it's a convenient and low cost way of creating resilient backups of my photos that doesn't require me to print everything. The archive will survive a lot more hardship than your average digital media, and does not require somewhat frequent usage to retain information. Harddrives lose their charge after 5-7 years of sitting unused, SSDs in as little as 2 years. Blu-Ray media will retain information for decades, and (according to the sales brochure) M-disc will retain information for a millenium, which i assume is about 900+ years longer than i need it to.
In theory, i could simply ditch the remote backup and rely on the M-disc media, but that's where convenience comes into play.
People have mentioned SyncThing and Seafile as straight backup options.
Another option one could consider is FolderSync[1]. It has a number of cloud back-ends it can interface with, but I use it to periodically SFTP to my home server to backup several areas in my phone, including photos, camera and app backups.
Two niceties for me it has:
* Two-way sync. I'll often clean up my camera roll on my PC, and that syncs back to the phone.
* Only attempts to connect to me home server if it is on my home wi-fi.
Putting my hat in this ring, too. I do a write-only sync of pictures from my phone to my NAS (upload new files and leave them on the phone - I prefer one way sync), and a mailbox-style sync of Signal backups (Signal can be configured to drop a backup file into a specified folder; I've configured FolderSync to upload whatever it finds there weekly and delete the backup locally). Finally, I do a two-way sync of my personal notes text file.
I don't have a good situation figured out for browsing unsorted uploaded photos, and I find that this is fine for my usage. I put a curated set of personal albums on a password protected personal site for friends and family. I enjoy the role of family chronicler.
My NAS is backed up via daily snapshot to a remote location.
I would also vote for FolderSync. I run seafile and nextcloud for other purposes, but have settled using FolderSync for phone --> NAS nightly backups and it is slick. I've been using Photoview to view backed up photos locally.
Finally. I thought I was crazy having to read through so many comments on here before someone mentioned just a simple SFTP to a backup server. FolderSync is the way to go.
Just a few weeks ago, facial recognition was added and that was it for me. I finally made the switch from Google Photos and iCloud to immich. It's your self-hosted google photos alternative, with image recognition, a map, sharing folders publicly, or with other users on your server.
Some parts will be buggy though, like face detection, or memories. But the whole "backup & sync" part is very reliable, I've never had any issues.
From what I can tell, Immich, Ente, and PhotoPrism are the best of the batch when it comes to open source photo storage and management. They are all good, but it depends on what you’re looking for.
Personally, I want: E2E encryption, on-device face recognition, and the ability to self-host as well as a paid option for people who don’t want to manage their own server. The existing options each hit about 90% of that, but it’s a different 90% for each one.
> Some parts will be buggy though, like face detection, or memories.
Frankly, I have had issues with Google Photos already. For me, it simply stopped recognizing faces since last October. I tried disabling and then enabling face recognition multiple times, but to no avail. It starts recognition from scratch, but only for photos before October. Writing to the support didn't help (although I didn't expect it to anyway), so alternatives like this one are becoming more and more tempting.
I'm already self-hosting a bunch of things, but facial recognition (when it was working) was much better in Google Photos and a major reason why I'm paying for additional storage.
I LOVE Immich. Been using it for a few months now, first on a Raspberry Pi 4 and then an old x86 box. Before Immich I had tried for a while to use Photoprism with Syncthing to sync photos from my phone, but the transition to that from Google Photos was a frustrating one.
Immich on the other hand expressly tries to be a Google Photos replacement, and while I initially thought that was an audacious goal for a fresh open source project to have, I have been pleasantly surprised by how feature-rich it has become in a short amount of time.
I know the developer makes it very clear that it's not stable yet, so I'm making sure I back up everything from my server at regular intervals. But I've found it to be more and more stable with new releases, so hopefully a first stable release is not far away.
Can I ask what specifically you like about it over Photprism? Just the sync?
I've also been questing for a Google Photos replacement, and right now Nextcloud functions admirably for auto-sync but like garbage for anything past that like viewing albums afterwards. I've had an instance of Photoprism up for a while and was debating bringing it into "production" on my homelab.
The biggest one was that Photoprism doesn't have a mobile app. It seems a lot of people use PhotoSync (a third party app) to back up to a PhotoPrism instance, but I didn't even want to give it a shot considering they don't offer the premium features on Android. Immich on the other hand has apps that are developed together with the server and web UI, so everything is well-integrated.
I'm using Synology Photos, have no complaints. Its really a good starter when decoupling from google photos, removing all subscription and taking control of my own data with expandable raid storage
+1 to this. I actually use both - Google photos for utility / sharing and Synology Photos for backup. It's good, easy to setup on both my device and my wife's.
I guess the Github description/HN title is incomplete, it's curious that it's saying it's a backup solution, but what is visible is an web-based photo browser... yeah yeah I get it, just like Google Photos (i.e. App-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named according to the docs[1]), the web viewer is part of the package...
I guess it needs a better description, IMO a project with several big components (web, mobile, backend) sells itself short being named just "backup solution".
Add a 2 3 line description right after your heading before Disclaimer and all other stuff that what this project actually is. What does self hosting and mobile phone mean here (I don't know if it makes your phone a backup server)
Readit News
this resonates with me.
what solution are you using?
One of my machine is always on and is backuped to the cloud everyday. Effectively making a backup of all my devices at once.
Better yet, since syncthing can also save staggered copies of modified files, a rm -rf * will be synced but the backup machine will still have copy from about 10s ago. This saved me a few times.
Once I realized that I had deleted a file a few months later. And I found it into the syncthing backup, itself within the cloud backup.
Very freeing.
I want an easier way to edit the comments on photos (as embedded metadata) that I haven't found yet. Any image browser where I can hit a convenient hotkey, type "Summer 2023 at the river with cousins X and Y" and move on would be great. If anyone has a suggestion I'm listening keenly! If this is built in to something on MacOS or a linux default desktop (like KDE or something I'm less familiar with), or is a small paid non-subscription app, I would buy it.
[1] https://photostructure.com/
Sadly I've not found a self-hosted like-for-like replacement. My photos now move from my phone to a folder that's backed up to s3 via Restic [2].
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2020/02/04/googl...
[2]: https://restic.net/
With AWSPics, sync your photos (just a simple directory tree on your local device) to S3 (I just do it manually from time to time from my desktop, but no doubt it can be done automatically at regular intervals, and/or it can be done directly from a phone), then Lambda functions generate thumbnails and browsable galleries (as static HTML), then you can view it all via CloudFront (password-protected using Origin Access Identity).
AWSPics isn't really being actively maintained these days. But it still works fine for me. The setup is cheap, you basically just pay for the S3 storage (currently costing me a bit under $1/month - and I guess you could use a cheaper S3-compatible alternative like Backblaze and reduce your costs further). No server to set up or maintain. Durable backup built-in. Fast reliable CDN built-in.
When I take a picture with my phone, it automatically gets backed up to iCloud, Google Photos, OneDrive, and Amazon Photos (free with prime).
When I had a personal computer, photos would sync to my computer and get backed up to BackBlaze also.
Works pretty well, although I wasn't seeking it out or researching other options
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Everything else is in Immich
Pictures and videos I take get backed up to Google Photos
Once a year I do a Google Takeout and import into Immich
This way I get the best of both worlds
I'm unclear if Syncthing inherently encrypts transfers, but layering it within Tailscale would add that. No?
> All device to device traffic is protected by TLS. To prevent uninvited devices from joining a cluster, the certificate fingerprint of each device is compared to a preset list of acceptable devices at connection establishment.
So yeah, transport is encrypted. I do believe they need to put that fact front and center, though. It took me a few minutes to find out. (Thanks for making me find out, though! I use Syncthing heavily and it never occurred to me to even question this.)
Didn't use the "rolling trashbin" feature yet but need to look into that
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fe-file-explorer-pro/id4994701...
On Mac (I am aware you have said Windows) So if I were you I’d just dump app the photos locally in normal folder hierarchies (yes drag and drop; not going hunting in Library folder) and then backup wherever you want them. Here’s something https://support.apple.com/en-in/HT205323. Googled it. Absolutely no idea whether it works or how.
Then put something like Dropbox on the job on iOS and it’ll keep uploading your pics and videos which will show up inside one folder on your Windows as well.
My point is — you can’t rely on iCloud after you setup your backup up sync strategy. So get all your data at one point then start your parallel backup/sync setup (and maybe leave iCloud on as well if price is not a concern).
- Go to https://privacy.apple.com - Choose "Request a copy of your data" - Select iCloud Photos
After a few days you'll receive a download link to the full iCloud Photos library. Perhaps only available in EU (it's a GDPR-mandated feature).
I consider myself to be technological advanced, but other than niche photographer, i wonder if 99.99 % of population would ever go through the effort of setting such a service ?
The added benefit of integrating federated social media is that if you want to share a file with your friends, there's zero load time because the file is already backed up on their Box, or it's striped across multiple Boxes and downloads quickly.
It would have to be dirt cheap though, like a Chromecast.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/m%C3%B6bius-sync/id1539203216
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Dead Comment
I appreciate the intent of this project, but it is not a sustainable approach.
If you are taking a couple of pictures a day, you only need to run this service for a couple of minutes per day, the rest is wasted. With Google Photos, as a SaaS, users are sharing computing power and each users are emitting less CO2.
https://engineering.teads.com/sustainability/carbon-footprin...
You can configure your server to sleep (scheduled or use WoL), which will halve (or more) that carbon emission number.
Speaking of which, individual action will never approach the level that corporate action could. Take a look at the practice of gas flaring (2022 estimate of ~357 million tons CO2) which is about ~45kg/person on earth. Changing flaring to capture will have a bigger impact than a minisucle fraction of the population not running a server.
But profits trump everything, so I guess we're stuck shaming individuals instead.
I sincerely didn't post my comment to shame anymore.
Need for computing is growing fast and it is actually not negligible at all. See the link below, data centers emitted 300 MTCo2 in 2020, similar to the number you mentioned.
https://www.iea.org/reports/data-centres-and-data-transmissi...
How did you get to 150kg of CO2 per user? I'm going to assume you mean each person has one instance rather than sharing an instance like a family would. So thats 375Kwh per year, which works out as drawing 42W. That seems rather high to me.
I'm hoping to try and run this on my Pi4 which idles at under 1W. You could run on a Macbook M1 which only under heavy load conumes 42W, but I doubt this is going to need consistent heavy load: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
For example, I host between 5-10 minecraft servers for my kids, but they sleep while the kids aren't playing on them and only spool up when a link is requested.
A properly configured Linux box would barely need a trickle of energy when nothing is demanding its resources, so I'd guess that the estimates are likely a bit on the high side.
The link I shared has the details of the calculation. The calculation assumes 50% CPU load which is most likely too high for this use case.
I'm not too comfortable pointing to the cloud providers for "efficiency", but you gotta go somewhere. I get that.
Personally I'm more a fan of building more efficient software (green software?). Using 6GB @ 4 cores to handle some media is a bit much IMO..
The CO2 we exhale does not contribute to climate change because it comes from plants (and indirectly animals) that captures it back.
If you burn coal to produce electricity, it releases CO2 in the atmosphere and it will take a long time to sequester that CO2 back into fossil fuel.
Self-hosting anything isn't sustainable. Even your modem or router isn't sustainable. But having additional backups and privacy is worth something for me. However since I'm in Europe, electricity prices here are through the roof and I try to minimize power where possible. I self host Immich on my Intel Celeron J1800 NAS that uses 19.1Wh on average. I cannot run any ML stuff that it comes with though. But for me the carbon intensity should be about 250 gCO₂eq/kWh [1]. So running my NAS produces about 42 Kg of CO₂ per year for 2 users [2]. Including 10 or so additional applications besides Immich. That sounds pretty reasonable to me.
1. https://www.eea.europa.eu/ims/greenhouse-gas-emission-intens...
2. ((0,0191 * 250 * 365,25 * 24) / 1000)
I am curious though, how did you come to 1.75kg per user? I calculated 20.9kg / user / year.
250/1000/1000 kgCO₂eq/Wh x 19.1 Wh x 8760 hours in a year / 2 users = 20.9 kg / user / year
And second, letting Google or Apple manage this doesn't mean it doesn't use energy. They're offsetting or generating? So am I.
When Google manages your pictures, they don't have idle servers for each users. This is the main reason their service is more sustainable.
It has object and face detection. Metadata indexing / searching and multi user support.
Deleted Comment
Kg of CO2 is a unit of fearmongering. And if you believe it's not, then the problem is why people are allowed to buy electricity so cheaply, not a photo-sync service.
By the way, a cow produces 120Kg of methane a year.
Thank goodness we're eating so many of them to help reduce their population.
/s
My "backup routine" consists of storing photos in iCloud, which is then syncronized "real time" to a local Mac Mini.
From the Mac Mini i then run scheduled backups to a local external harddrive, as well as a local Raspberry Pi running Minio, and nightly to OneDrive.
The external harddrive backup uses Timemachine, the raspberry pi backup uses Kopia, and OneDrive is done with Arq.
Furthermore, i make yearly archive discs. Identical copies on M-disc Blu-Ray media, stored in geographically different locations. Each disc contains the photos that have changed in the previous 12 months, and no encryption/archiving is used.
Alongside the M-disc media i keep a couple of external harddrives that contains the entire photo library. These are checked (with badblocks, non-destructive surface scan) yearly, updated and rotated when storing the new M-disc media.
The photos also likely have EXIF GPS data and timestamps, so it's also a track log of location history.
I'm aware of that, though it's no different from any other US based cloud provider. I am however a citizen of the EU, so there's the EU/US safe harbor (or Schrems II) agreement in place.
In the end it all comes down to trust vs convenience. I trust Apple more than Amazon or Google, and about as much as Microsoft. Apple keeps my data on EU soil, and is a lot more convenient on Apple platforms. Microsoft sends all OneDrive data to the US.
I do however use Advanced Data Protection for iCloud, which e2e encrypts photos and others. All backups, including local ones, are source encrypted.
These days it's all digital photos, and i think most people agree that some kind of backup is needed. If you primarily use a cloud service, there is probably little risk that your data suddenly vanishes (though it has happened), but instead you're faced with the danger of losing access to that account, meaning your stuff might still exist, you just no longer have access to it.
My "normal" backup routing is simply "iCloud -> Mac Mini -> external harddrive + OneDrive", and the Raspberry Pi and Kopia is a (long running) test to eventually replace time machine.
As for the M-disc archive, it's a convenient and low cost way of creating resilient backups of my photos that doesn't require me to print everything. The archive will survive a lot more hardship than your average digital media, and does not require somewhat frequent usage to retain information. Harddrives lose their charge after 5-7 years of sitting unused, SSDs in as little as 2 years. Blu-Ray media will retain information for decades, and (according to the sales brochure) M-disc will retain information for a millenium, which i assume is about 900+ years longer than i need it to.
In theory, i could simply ditch the remote backup and rely on the M-disc media, but that's where convenience comes into play.
Another option one could consider is FolderSync[1]. It has a number of cloud back-ends it can interface with, but I use it to periodically SFTP to my home server to backup several areas in my phone, including photos, camera and app backups.
Two niceties for me it has:
* Two-way sync. I'll often clean up my camera roll on my PC, and that syncs back to the phone.
* Only attempts to connect to me home server if it is on my home wi-fi.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dk.tacit.andro...
I don't have a good situation figured out for browsing unsorted uploaded photos, and I find that this is fine for my usage. I put a curated set of personal albums on a password protected personal site for friends and family. I enjoy the role of family chronicler.
My NAS is backed up via daily snapshot to a remote location.
YMMV!
> Expect bugs and breaking changes.
I get it's the pretty normal to go through fixing bugs, but for a backup solution the core of it should be stable or I would not use it
Just a few weeks ago, facial recognition was added and that was it for me. I finally made the switch from Google Photos and iCloud to immich. It's your self-hosted google photos alternative, with image recognition, a map, sharing folders publicly, or with other users on your server.
Some parts will be buggy though, like face detection, or memories. But the whole "backup & sync" part is very reliable, I've never had any issues.
From what I can tell, Immich, Ente, and PhotoPrism are the best of the batch when it comes to open source photo storage and management. They are all good, but it depends on what you’re looking for.
Personally, I want: E2E encryption, on-device face recognition, and the ability to self-host as well as a paid option for people who don’t want to manage their own server. The existing options each hit about 90% of that, but it’s a different 90% for each one.
Frankly, I have had issues with Google Photos already. For me, it simply stopped recognizing faces since last October. I tried disabling and then enabling face recognition multiple times, but to no avail. It starts recognition from scratch, but only for photos before October. Writing to the support didn't help (although I didn't expect it to anyway), so alternatives like this one are becoming more and more tempting.
I'm already self-hosting a bunch of things, but facial recognition (when it was working) was much better in Google Photos and a major reason why I'm paying for additional storage.
It’s explicitly saying it’s not a backup solution.
Immich on the other hand expressly tries to be a Google Photos replacement, and while I initially thought that was an audacious goal for a fresh open source project to have, I have been pleasantly surprised by how feature-rich it has become in a short amount of time.
I know the developer makes it very clear that it's not stable yet, so I'm making sure I back up everything from my server at regular intervals. But I've found it to be more and more stable with new releases, so hopefully a first stable release is not far away.
I've also been questing for a Google Photos replacement, and right now Nextcloud functions admirably for auto-sync but like garbage for anything past that like viewing albums afterwards. I've had an instance of Photoprism up for a while and was debating bringing it into "production" on my homelab.
I've spent too much time setting up fun docker instances on it instead
I guess it needs a better description, IMO a project with several big components (web, mobile, backend) sells itself short being named just "backup solution".
[1] https://immich.app/docs/overview/introduction