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Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

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Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#31

Post by capableweb »

vocatan wrote: post #27

Just to add context - I do have backups, but they're spread across a myriad of different hard drives. I had used Amazon Photos to consolidate, and benefit from the facial recognition to be able to quickly locate pictures of family members quickly. I think that I'll give DigiKam another go, against the NAS loaded up. Thanks for the comments!

> I think that I'll give DigiKam another go, against the NAS loaded up.

I'm also looking for something FOSS that can do basic face recognition + maybe even more, but last time I checked DigiKam's detection didn't work so well, or maybe I got spoiled by the detection in Google Photos. If you do give it a go, would be nice if you reported back on your experience :)

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#32

Post by bayindirh »

vocatan wrote: post #27

Just to add context - I do have backups, but they're spread across a myriad of different hard drives. I had used Amazon Photos to consolidate, and benefit from the facial recognition to be able to quickly locate pictures of family members quickly. I think that I'll give DigiKam another go, against the NAS loaded up. Thanks for the comments!

Digikam is the bees knees in digital asset management. I manage my personal photo archive with that, and it punches way above its weight.

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#33

Post by ALLTaken »

stepri wrote: post #16

This is just a reminder to take a backup of your cloud photos and store it locally (or other cloud provider). For example, with Google Takeout you can get a ZIP file with all your photos and videos from Google Photos.

For iCloud, would just copying images from iCloud to the backup media be enough?

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#34

Post by plagiarist »

paddez wrote: post #9

As a slight aside - I was surprised to learn that Amazon Photos (if you have Prime) includes RAW camera formats as valid photos for the purposes of their unlimited storage offer. I've taken to essentially backing up all my RAWs to Amazon Photos - even the ones I would typically discard.

I also. I don't know why they would offer that as part of their base Prime service when no competitors seem to. The upsell for printing doesn't seem appealing to the type of person who would be storing RAWs.

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#35

Post by lordnacho »

madethemcry wrote: post #26
gdelfino01 wrote: post #3

I love my Synology NAS. It handles photos great: https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/feature/photos

Me too! I don't trust to open my network to the internet though. So I've created a VPN to connect with my ubiquity network from mobile. Sadly, I can't share photos with other folks or allow my family to participate easily. I'm a layman in terms of networking. I always wonder how people can sleep if they open their home network. In this case either by using QuickConnect or forward ports and access the machine through…

My solution is to not open it. Use the cloud for browsing, use the home machine to copy the files down. You rarely need to browse on the home machine, it's really just there if the cloud provider ditches you.

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#36

Post by flykespice »

That is why always you should synchronize your cloud with a local backup storage, always remain skeptical on cloud-backed storage as you are relying on someone else keeping it up (it can go anytime).

Cloud storage is just as volatile as your physical storage breaking or getting lost.

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#37

Post by komali2 »

That super sucks. Stories like this (but about Google Photos) led to me setting up the following backup strategy.

1. First, all photos are on a fat external harddrive connected to a homelab server. When I come home with photos, I dump them onto this (TODO to find a way to automatically copy them into the proper spot off the camera upon the camera being plugged in, or a different spot if the gopro is plugged in)

2. Once a day, these are rsynced to a separate set of harddrives, which serve self hosted photo software I use (similar functionality to google photos. Looking for a replacement that lets me create arbitrary albums of photos, and then create web pages pointing to those arbitrary albums, that's FOSS. Currently evaluating photoview and librephotos)

3. Once a day, all photos are backed up to a backblaze b2 bucket using duplicati. with several previous versions also kept.

4. Once a year, a fucknormous external drive is purchased, all photos dumped onto it, and mailed to my parent's house, where they put it into a firebox.

5. Oh, and all my photos are also uploaded to google photos, because why not

I'm very much a scrub when it comes to sysadmin tasks and was able to set up all of the above with about... I don't know, no more than 100 hours of effort I'm sure, probably less. I recommend at least looking into consumer backup services like the one by backblaze!

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#38

Post by bayindirh »

ALLTaken wrote: post #33
stepri wrote: post #16

This is just a reminder to take a backup of your cloud photos and store it locally (or other cloud provider). For example, with Google Takeout you can get a ZIP file with all your photos and videos from Google Photos.

For iCloud, would just copying images from iCloud to the backup media be enough?

Local photo library is a folder, disguised as a package. One of the folders store all the originals on the device. Copy that folder, and you're good to go. You can also get the full folder hierarchy, if you wish.

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#39

Post by tastemykungfu »

bayindirh wrote: post #32
vocatan wrote: post #27

Just to add context - I do have backups, but they're spread across a myriad of different hard drives. I had used Amazon Photos to consolidate, and benefit from the facial recognition to be able to quickly locate pictures of family members quickly. I think that I'll give DigiKam another go, against the NAS loaded up. Thanks for the comments!

Digikam is the bees knees in digital asset management. I manage my personal photo archive with that, and it punches way above its weight.

Except for it's horrible face recognition right?.. ugh.
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