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.
I have the same need... I use Nextcloud for many things (including photo upload) but I can't stand their photos app. I use photoprism for the photos app and I love it.
I just have the same directory mounted to both my Nextcloud & Photoprism containers. They both operate with a normal directory of files on the file system, so I just have them both use the same directory to store data.
+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!
I would be very careful when setting up any kind of replication on backup repositories. I much prefer to actually backup to multiple destination, since when replicating, any error will propagate to the synchronized repositories as well, rendering all of the equally useless.
Great advice thanks - I have taken some steps to mitigate that (snapshotting, and a manual weekly USB backup) but you're right, this is an area I should look at more closely.
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.
I don’t want it to be synced. I want my pictures and videos to be backed up.
I have 2TB on iCloud, 2TB on Google Drive, unlimited back up of photos on Amazon Drive and 1TB on OneDrive. When my OneDrive account gives out of space, I’ll just use one of the other 6 accounts that come with an Office 365 subscription.
I guess for an archive solution, I would use my personal AWS account that’s only used to store my videos that fell off the back of a truck once I took my Plex server off line.
I have 2TB of videos stored in AWS S3 Deep Glacier archive. I’m charged like $2 a month for it.
Yeah, I get your intent, but I think there's some conflation of backup and sync.
Here's a hypothetical - imagine you deleted a photo from your phone, and then modified (in place) a different photo.
Is your expectation that the first would be deleted from the various places you have it backed-up? (If not, then what's your process for fully destroying a photo?)
Would the second be propagated to each of your SaaS storage providers overwriting the existing, or renamed and situated adjacent to the original? And if you modified it in-place a second time?
If your phone were then to stop working and needed replacing, would the restoration process restore your phone to before, or after, the above deletions / changes were made? ie. would the deleted photo exist on your phone, would the second photo be pre, mid, or post modifications?
(I draw the distinction between backups and archives whereby backups get you to where you were most recently (pre incident), and archives let you restore to something like 'Tuesday afternoon, two weeks ago'. I'm talking here purely about backups vs sync though.)
It gets backed up to all of these? On iOS I have tried all except Google and they are all finicky. Even iCloud/Photos.app seems to have a brain of its own.
And on the Mac Apple engineers have made sure the photos are not synced in a simple easy folder hierarchy that can be backed up elsewhere.
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 don't want to degoogle, but having all my photos hinging on a Google account that can more or less arbitrarily blocked by Google gives me anxiety. Google Takeout effectively destroys your data by stripping all metadata from the photos and putting them into a json file. I haven't found a good solution for regular backups of Photos, has anyone else?
Call me old fashioned, but I just don't feel confident in placing my valuable data only with a provider like Google. One day there will be an "Ooopsee, we found a bug in our hash function (refactored by summer intern) and um...data for 'a very small number' of users was backed up to the /dev/null shard..."
I'm very satisfied with PiGallery2. I'd love to try PiGallery3, but I can't find it. Could you share the link for the project, or was it a typo? (hope not!)
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.
how do you get the photos out of Google Photos (and delete them from there I assume?)? I started on a CLI that could track photos across different accounts and make it easy to move then between them i.e. from GP to s3 or to a local drive etc. Was going to include duplicate detection. But if there is already another tool...?
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.)
Thanks for finding that. I had the impression syncthing was focused on efficiency only, and not necessarily privacy/encryption. I had the impression a synced copy would be rebuilt from several sources at once, over the syncthing discovery protocol - and may not be encrypted in transit.
+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
And to avoid mishaps, you can also set the phone side to be send only.
Do remember that as you delete photos on your phone to save space, it will delete them on the PC. You would need the PC side to move the photos to a different directory (a cronjob would do).
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 use https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do... running on my NAS to regularly download photos from my wife's iCloud account. The photos are stored in full resolution on iCloud with the EXIF data, unlike Google Photos, so that's nice. The only annoyance is that you need to reauthorize the tool every three months. But it sends you a reminder when the time is coming up.
Beware that edits, portraits and some custom photo modes aren't currently downloaded. And modifying an edit twice or more will not sync. (no modtime or chksum)
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.
Honestly I think Apple has a good model for this. The value would be in making the box plug-and-play. Apple has proven people will pay a premium for devices that Just Work. It could still be built on open software. Some kind of a cross between Apple’s opinionated approach to defaults and RedHat’s pay-for-support model of developing open source software.
The problem being solved here is data locality. This idea predates the TV show by literally decades.
Apple doesn’t want to sell us a box. They want to sell us a subscription. My assertion is that Apple’s model of selling hardware would work for home servers.
I repeat myself: focus your mind on the value, or the problem the customer is looking to solve. Data locality isn’t a problem, it’s an implementation choice or detail.
The problem is something like: “I need to keep my family photos/files safe” or “I need to store customer orders and data” or “I need a way to protect my data when I drop my phone in the toilet.”
Even giant companies with eye-watering IT budgets see the appeal of having someone else manage their physical hardware and software infrastructure.. I haven’t worked at a company that owned its own servers in nearly a decade.
Apple doesn’t want to sell us a box and coincidentally nobody wants to buy a box.
Home hosting protects from institutional threats like governments, TLAs, and LEO. Cloud providers can’t offer that. They’re a huge target and it’s an open secret they are compromised. Apple even tried to pitch that as a feature. And they’re the leaders in privacy!
It’s easy to reason about data locality. I can have a literal social network of just my actual friends and no tech company gets to spy on it.
Cloud backups are still good for disaster recovery if they are fully encrypted.
Wow! Those institutional threats sound pretty sophisticated. I’m sure the average self-hosting solution is prepared for adversaries like that, and when agents come knocking on my door I’ll just tell them “no hard drives here!”
You know, with such a scary and complex network of online adversaries and government agencies, I wonder if I could pay someone else to manage that risk for me. My business is selling online greeting cards for pets and I don’t really specialize in network security and data protection.
Okay, crazy idea. What if you didn't even need a piece of hardware and the service included online storage? It would simplify it even more for the end user so they didn't have to plug in hardware and maintain it. We could call this service something like eOnlineStorage or iBackupPhotos, maybe charge a varying price up to $9.99 a month for it.
Box would be a one-time purchase. There's no maintenance involved - if it breaks, you just buy a new one and log in, and redownload all of your data from your friends.
They used to have the AirPort which was pretty much iCloud at home. And the early iPod was intended to be a portable personal profile you could plug in to any Mac. We’re not on the best timeline.
I use synology myself, don't have experience with qnap but I think it will be pretty similar. plug the box, activate the service, download the phone app and your photos are automatically synced and browsable from the device. You can add other services but the basic functionality is there.
Because nobody outside of HN is going to install software on an old phone or laptop. But they'll buy a $30 Box.
By all means the software will be open-source (and mostly off-the-shelf if possible) so anyone can install it on whatever device they have, but the killer product will be the Box.
Yeah but it doesn't support syncing photos from the camera roll. So you have to use something else to copy photos from the camera roll to the mobius sync folder. I use the PhotoSync app for that, but it's not free and it's not that reliable. And the extra step adds even more latency to the whole pipeline. iOS allows these apps to run in the background only once per day generally, and so it can be several days before photos get all the way synced.
If this app can do background sync of the camera roll directly from iOS to an Android device in one step I may switch to it and stop using both Mobius Sync and Photosync.
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.
Apple provides access to photos just fine, using a different API.
Having a separate API for photo access is annoying while developing this use case, but it's appropriate for a couple different reasons: for one, if apps could access the raw files, that could reveal metadata like location. For another, filesystem access wouldn't properly handle cloud-synced photo libraries.
Perhaps photos on iOS are persisted into some sqlite-style database on the device rather than as individual files...
The Dropbox iOS app would be a good example here. It acts as a ReplicatedFileProvider so apps on the device can access your Dropbox files, but it also provides an optional config flow where users can ask for their photos to be backed up. Then, the Dropbox app fetches the photos through PhotoKit and writes the .JPEGs or .HEICs to a folder of your choosing into your Dropbox files.
That’s what I mean, there are technical reasons why it doesn’t necessarily make sense to represent photos as individual files: they might not live in a file system, they might have to be downloaded, they might have to be transparently converted from one format to another, they might have to have metadata transparently stripped. Any applications are going to need to use an API to get the right form of photo that the user wants anyway. Having a dedicated API that users can call as they need makes more sense than having the operating system hackishly pretend that your photos live in a bucket of JPEGs somewhere
You can use it for photos, but for those contained within the photos library that's handled separately through the PhotoKit now. It should be technically possible to backup your photos library through syncthing, I only think the automation of such and the permissions required would probably be annoying to deal with. Not sure if Mobius developer(s) looked into that yet.
If you don't use the photos app, you can keep them all in the files app and it syncs just fine. Annoying to use since the files app is nowhere near as nice for photo browsing/management.
What I've done is to leave a Windows VM running which has both the iCloud Photos app, as well as Syncthing, both pointing at same directory. This then works as an iCloud/syncthing bridge, letting my iPhone sync with my linux machines.
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.
> See the link below, data centers emitted 300 MTCo2 in 2020, similar to the number you mentioned.
Wow, I didn't realize there were so many datacenters. My comment about corporate action still stands though - there's no reason why companies running those data centers cannot switch to renewable sources for even a portion of their usage.
I'm no fanboy but I was impressed to see how Apple's office is 100% powered by solar (75% through rooftop, rest through an offsite farm) :
According to Renewable Energy World, the campus will run entirely on renewable energy. It will generate 17 megawatts (MW) of solar on rooftops and also be supplemented by 4 megawatts of Bloom Energy fuel cells. They’re hoping that this onsite generation will cover around 75% of power requirements during working hours. The remaining energy needed will be supplied by a 130-megawatt off-site solar farm in Monterey County.
Most cloud providers already claim being carbon neutral for EU and US regions. Unfortunately, there is a lot of waste there too, so there goes the little bit of green energy we have.
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?
Do you not understand your power and actions are so little next to these corporates to the point that it really doesn't matter? The other day I thought maybe me and my gf should merge our facebook account, you know, to save up space in facebook
It's not defeatist or nihilist, it's understanding that policy and law (or an individual CEO's or politician's choice) has orders of magnitude more impact that individual actions.
> I don't understand how or why this defeatist, nihilistic attitude is growing in popularity.
The attitude of "here's a simple step that will cut down your individual carbon emissions, and also please pay attention to the primary sources of the problem"? Because that attitude doesn't seem defeatist or nihilistic at all? I don't think the "profits trump everything" comment was an endorsement of that philosophy.
If I misunderstood, and you were talking about the people hiding behind the companies and industries who are destroying the environment so that they can enrich themselves at everyone's expense then I'd guess that those folks are entirely self-aware and simply don't care that they act out of malice.
It seems like they're willing to hurt anyone and destroy anything if it might grant them a little more money. I wish people would start seeing them for the threat that they are, and spent a lot more of their time thinking about what should be done about those kinds of psychopaths instead of spinning their wheels worrying about how long their computer stays awake.
inaction is bad, but wasted and misdirected action can be every bit as harmful. Focusing on the people who are consistently doing the most harm in the shortest amount of time is only logical unless people have become too defeatist to believe that anything can be done to stop the abuses of industry.
So you support Bill Gates creating an uncountable amount of CO2 with his inefficient OS (not to mention ewaste from CPU limiting), but a single individual running their server for a few hours longer than you like is “tantamount to malice”? Do you even care about Earth, or do you just care about reciting capitalist talking points?
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 am not sure this argument is correct. Animals have a carbon footprint. More importantly, it seems like control over data is a stronger concern than a such a small amount.
> 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.
> What you are saying makes sense. If you are running other valuable apps, then it isn't a waste.
'Valuable' is pretty subjective though. Most of the services are for entertainment purposes. But I also host quite a few useful things such as Bitwarden and CouchDB for Obsidian Sync.
> I calculated 20.9kg / user / year.
You are right. I forgot the 24 hours in my calculation:
(0,0191 * 250 * 365,25 * 24) / 1000
I also noticed that my comment was incorrectly formatted. I've since edited my original comment. If I factor in my complete homelab I use about 40Wh, which corresponds with about 90kg of CO₂ yearly. Which doesn't sound all that bad 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.
Multiuser support is free, face detection is cheap enough embedded camera chips do it, metadata indexing is cheap with any recent DB engine, search is cheap with them as well.
The only computationally expensive thing here is face matching. Photoprism recommends two cores and 3G RAM and claims to be able to run on a NAS.
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.
the point of immich and photoprism is that you host them on your computer, on your own network and it never goes through those centralized entities in the first place.
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.
My photo library contains a large part of the moments of my life worth remembering, from being a kid, teenager, young adult, meeting my wife, our kids , pets, and everything between. I would seriously hate to lose it because somebody knocks over a can of soda.
There are two major threats to my photo library. One is loss of the cloud data
and/or loss of access to it (and/or malware, natural disasters, etc), which is why i keep data locally as well.
The other is loss of data locally, anything from a failed piece of equipment to a house fire.
The reason why i make a local backup of the synchronized cloud data is in case malware decides to encrypt/delete all my photos, in which case iCloud will happily synchronize all the changes to all devices, effectively deleting all good copies.
So with a local backup of the data i've mitigated the first threat, loss of cloud data and/or access to it, but i'm still left with the threat of losing data at home, which is why i also backup to a different cloud provider, which again comes with a threat of losing access, and this is where the Blu-Ray archive comes in.
Because burning Blu-Ray discs is time consuming, i rely on my "day to day" 3-2-1 backup to keep data safe, but ultimately the Blu-Ray discs safeguards against loss of cloud data and loss of local data (identical copies stored in different locations), so they're my last ditch defense of disaster recovery.
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.
Photoprism had the critical flaw of being single user last time I tried it, making it neat but a complete non starter for someone with a family larger than 1.
Is there anyone in your family that you really want to have access to all your photos? Not even referring to just NSFW stuff. If your answer is "as the admin I'm the only one that can access everything" then consider the question from your family's POV. Not trying to discount your point only pointing out that single user and e2ee implementations have some value.
All the photos, no; but adding users from my family to back up from their devices, see their content, and share things between family members is a huge gap in Photoprism and why I stopped using it.
You make a good point and you are right, but for me the concern is that the same account can break a lot of stuff. I agree, if I put a photo out there, I don’t care who sees it if I’ve given them the password. But I just worry about people deleting things, mucking up the database, etc.
That's fair. Personally I'd like to see (and am working on) more solutions that make it realistic for everyone to run their own single user instances. Selfhosting shouldn't be any more difficult less secure than running an app on your phone.
The same goes for me and I imagine many more. This is literally the only thing holding it back from being the perfect Google Photos replacement for families with someone who self-hosts.
iCloud photos has all of that except the self-host option. You may be aware - just saying as I didn't see it on your list, and the E2EE is somewhat new.
As someone who tried to organize a few hundred photos on iOS, the UX is severely crippled. For example, moving pictures from one album to another, or an album from one folder to another, are still unimplemented, among many other simple things.
It might have all those good features, but it lacks a practical user experience.
I’m currently using iCloud. It’s great, but the E2EE comes with the huge caveat that they scan your photos before encrypting, against a giant unaccountable database of hashes for bad stuff.
Even though I totally believe that the current set of hashes really does represent truly horrible stuff, I also suspect that it will expand over time to include anything that threatens those in power. In other words: they are coming for your Bernie memes.
So I would like to have a more secure option that doesn’t depend on the whims of the powerful to decide which images I’m allowed to own.
Apple shelved this feature a while ago, what you are thinking about is that it uses an on-device AI to scan for nudity in pictures sent to minors through iMessage, which doesn’t report anything back to apple.
Let’s hope it stays shelved then. In my experience, things are much easier to sneak into the details of some random update once the key functionality has been built and deployed. The root issue here is a loss of trust.
Why not go for immich, and try adding the E2E on top? Immich will encrypt the pictures before sending them on the server, and decrypt them when trying to access them, local thumbnails, etc. That could work?
> 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)
I like the look of this. I'm currently using PhotoPrism[1] and PhotoSync[2] as a combo to get the same thing and whilst it works fine I've always thought a single app would be far better placed.
Looks relatively straightforward to get running, pretty much inline with what I had to do in order to get PhotoPrism running in the first place. Only thing I couldn't see anything about was hardware acceleration, do leverage any of the Intel instructions (VAAPI) for transcoding? That's a paid feature on PhotoPrism and something that's sorely needed. CPU bound transcoding is terrible!
Think I'll put this on the TODO list for the weekend!
Nothing in iOS seems to have true autobackup because background apps don’t seem to reliably wake. What I find is that it works until the app is closed, like after an os update, and then you have to manually open the app before it will start going again. I have mine set to try to run whenever I plug in to charge, and it works pretty consistently until reboot, and from there I’m not consistent about remembering to open the app again.
Well, Google Photos works on iOS. And I presume they would be as much a third party app as anyone else. So it is possible. From what I remember reading in the past it is possible to get wakeup events for GPS location changes. I think that's one trick to get an app to run in the background.
I agree though. It's a shame how iOS is completely crippling background apps.
I'm hoping for an alternative for Google Photos and I'm paying for ente.io. It works fine on Android, but background sync doesn't work on iOS. So for me personally it is not ready to replace Google Photos. If it can't be set and forget for non-technical family members it's not going to cut it.
Thanks for pointing out the workaround with GPS, will look into it!
Currently on iOS, our servers send silent pushes to your device every hour. This wakes up the app and gives us 30 seconds to execute a background sync (provided you've previously not killed the app). This is not sufficient to backup videos, but it works pretty well for incremental backup of photos (I personally use an iPhone).
Oh, hey! ente.io is super promising! Have been following and paying for it for 2 years now :)
> This wakes up the app and gives us 30 seconds to execute a background sync (provided you've previously not killed the app).
I wonder if this is the crux of the matter. It doesn't work when the app hasn't been started in the first place, right? I don't know how Google Photos does it, but I'm pretty sure they have solved syncing without having to remember to open the app. I half wonder whether they achieve this by showing constant notifications about "look what happened x years ago" or "look at this new collage" that gets people to click on it and actually start the app.
It does. I use PS to sync to a WebDAV server I rent. I set PS to auto-backup when I put my phone on the charger and when I arrive at home (whether you consider this "auto" is up to you). I have opened the app exactly 0 times in the last year, and my photo backup is up to date as of this morning. PS is a shining example of a simple, reliable app.
I use an app called PhotoSync on iOS and use that to sync my stuff to whatever backup solution I use. Currently that’s photoprism but it can do all kinds of stuff like WebDAV, file system, Dropbox etc
I hope I don't come across as entitled or an asshole, but Docker means I'm not getting near it. Would love to see a bare host installation option for us BSD folks so I can stick it in a jail. Looks real good though! I'll be checking in now and then to see if that happens.
I wish Google Photos UI was better but it still seems to be the best solution. Hosting something like this seems like it would cost more time/money/frustration than its worth.
On the other hand, I always think its awesome to see self hosted solutions! It helps to create competition.
> Hosting something like this seems like it would cost more time/money/frustration than its worth.
If you've never self hosted anything there is indeed a large initial time and money investment. However, going through it once it pays itself off in the long run and adding additional services or maintaining existing ones becomes trivial.
Actually owning your data and having full control over it without worrying who it might be shared with or how it might be used is absolutely worth the hassle for some people.
I worry about catastrophic data loss. Even at Google scale you hear stories of things going wrong and they have to resort to off-site offline storage; for stuff like photos of my kids, I just don't trust myself, the SW provider, hardware etc to sufficiently insulate me from something crazy going wrong. It only needs to happen once.
About to have my first kid, have been thinking deeply about this and decided having my own storage server is the best route. ZFS raid with redundancy to survive 2 drive losses.
Will also backup offsite and take a manual snapshot each year for all my pics. Unlikely that I will backup the Plex-style media.
I am just as afraid of Google shutting off my account as I am about losing my own data.
I’ve been thinking about creating a service to back files up for 100+ years. I think s3 will be around that long, but the offering would need to survive the saas shutdown with a way to continue paying the bills. Could have an escrow fund to incentivize devs to maintain cloud storage integrations, with some sort of a voting mechanism for subscribers (crypto tokens for corp governance?)
Just putting a few half baked thoughts into the ether in case you find it interesting.
1. I use nextcloud to backup photos to my NAS
2. A nightly job backups my photos to Amazon Glacier (very cheap to store, very expensive to retrieve) - This is only in the case of a catastrophic failure (e.g. house burns down).
3. Every month or so I copy the photos to an external drive (manually)
I am thinking of buying a NAS that I can setup in my parents house so I can transfer them over there automatically instead of the manual copy action to the external drive
> I wish Google Photos UI was better but it still seems to be the best solution
Unless you have kids. [If you have kids Google is a no-go](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil...). Since becoming a dad I've finally started to untangle myself from Google. Only thing left is my android phone - seriously considering an alternative e.g. apple (but I wouldn't store pictures with them either)
I was expecting this to be Hacker News hyperbole but god that is TERRIFYING. Apple's CSAM plans were using a database of known images and got enough backlash, but Google trying to use AI to detect abuse? What a HORRIBLE idea.
I also use nextcloud, but I've been planning on trying out immich. I used to use google photos and the migration to nextcloud left a lot to be desired. There doesn't seem to be a way to "free up space" the same way google photos could automatically delete already backed-up photos, so i have to do that manually periodically. But crucially the scrolling / thumbnail performance of the nextcloud photos timeline is terrible even with an SSD cache in my synology as well as running NC previously on an overpowered rack mount server, of course using redis with NC and all the usual optimization tips. Thumbnails take a few seconds to load making it near impossible to track down photos from more than 6 months ago.
The thing that stood out to me about immich was how when I first saw a show-off post on /r/selfhosted, it included a video showing how instant the thumbnails loaded as well as some background on how they were focusing on optimizing the scrolling performance and ensuring blurred thumbnails would be available asap when scrolling. I was impressed at how it stacked up to the experience of using google photos.
Hey man, maintainer of the project here. This is one of the feature we are working toward, after getting the Facial Recognition some more loves and fine tunning :)
