Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

amazonforum.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 357 posts

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

#301

Post by rchaud »

godshatter wrote: post #218

This is a general question; is no one else worried about Amazon or whichever company trolling your photos with face recognition, building up a graph of who you are connected to, all in the name of "giving you a better shopping experience"? Or who knows what else they might do with the meta data or AI object recognition shenanigans. I guess I don't extend much trust to the companies that provide these services, especi…

Amazon Photos for face recognition

Amazon Alexa for voice recognition and eavesdropping

Amazon subsidiary Ring.com to spy on your neighbor's driveway

AWS pulling it all together to send this panopticon to your local police department.

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

#302

Post by philsnow »

wh33zle wrote: post #71
capableweb wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 :)

Not sure if it has been mentioned already but photoprism added face recognition a few releases ago and it is working well for me: https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism The quality of this software is overall extremely good. It is a solo-developer as well so you might want to consider sponsoring them if you end up using it. I am not affiliated, just a happy user :)

To photoprism users: do you know how well it handles identifying photos of kids over the span of years?

Google photos absolutely blows me away with its ~1% false positive rate (that is, given a photo, correctly identifying with kid(s) are in it) identifying each of my kids, nieces, and nephews. I don’t really know what its false negative rate (a false negative would be an uploaded photo of John but that doesn’t get tagged as having John in it) is, though.

I can search for each of my kids and see photos of them going back to their birth.

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

#303

Post by prox »

lostlogin wrote: post #266
aftbit wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO the biggest remaining risk to this is a house fire at night while you are at home. You wake up to alarms and smoke and run out the door without your phone. All three copies of your photos will burn at once. This is where an additional off-site would be valuable. That might be a second external hard drive that you store off-site and re-sync every few months, or maybe an encrypted cloud backup using restic.

It’s pretty easy to set the Synology to upload to a cloud provider for a folder or file share. It has alerts and all sorts.

Could you do a swap with a friend/colleague? So upload to their NAS and vice versa.

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

#304

Post by ClumsyPilot »

luckylion wrote: post #234
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think people care enough about SLAs to pay a premium Huh? People specifically pay for cloud to not lose their data. Before that my parents used to copy photos from laptop to laptop, and lose them when a hard disk failed. Now if cloud loses your data, they might ask wtf am I paying for.

There's "cloud" and there's "guaranteed cloud with SLA and compensation if it fails", and the latter will be more expensive. The former is somewhat "best effort", and that's also why it's cheap.

Is it really cheap? For 3 years of cloud subscribtion, I can buy 2 Nas drives, drop them at the homes of two of my friends, sync my PC to NAS 1, and backup NAS 1 to NAS 2.

They are like 2 -click setup if you use Synology/Qnap/etc.

And I will have more storage space.

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

#305

Post by deltarholamda »

getoffmyyawn wrote: post #281

I used to seriously stress out worrying about the huge amount of family photos I have saved in cloud storage and what it would mean to lose them. I've got a local backup as well of course. Even that has to be upgraded every so often to make sure the hardware will continue to run reliably. A few years ago my (very non-technical) mother asked me to make and send her a photo album of recent pictures. My wife and I had s…

This is definitely the way. This is also the best way to cement memories with your kids as well, and they love the process.

Professional photographers take a thousand photos, but they only use one. Quality, not quantity.

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

#306

Post by sangnoir »

lostlogin wrote: post #230
duffyjp wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was doing just this for a while but stopped because my Mac Mini was too old for the last few OS releases. I then switched to using the Windows iCloud client but a bug from ~2 years ago that consumes tremendous CPU cycles made that less than ideal. (The best you can do is lock it to a single thread, which will then use 100% 24/7) Now I just don't backup my iCloud, though I do remove everything older than one year ev…

You can do it in a VM just fine too. There is usually someone who’ll point out that this probably violates licensing, and it probably does if you do it on non-Apple hardware.

I have an older Mac model I use as a linux box: you just reminded me I install a Mac OS VM without violating the license - thanks!

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

#307

Post by 8fingerlouie »

agotterer wrote: post #151
8fingerlouie wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep my data in the cloud, with a local 1:1 mirror of which i keep a 3-2-1 backup (local + cloud). Besides that i keep USB drives and M-disc archives of photos, identical sets stored in geographically separate locations. Optical media should be resilient to most natural phenomenon like flooding and solar flares. They're not resilient to fires, which is why i keep duplicate sets.

I keep everything in the cloud as well. Documents are either in GDrive / Dropbox and photos are in iCloud. For sensitive documents I created an encrypted disk image that I store in Dropbox and mount when I need access to it, which is pretty infrequent. I periodically backup content to a NAS and I backup the NAS to B2.

I use Cryptomator ( https://cryptomator.org/ ) for sensitive stuff. It offers transparent encryption across Linux, windows, MacOS, iOS and Android.

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

#308

Post by [deleted] »

yaseer wrote: post #293
AdamN wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+100. The best and really only useful copy of your digital photo library is a curated set of prints, ideally as part of a book or a calendar.

+101. My wife and I now have an annual tradition of making physical albums of memories from the past year. Making the album in January is not just fun - it makes you mindful of fond memories at a time when you're likely to think "Geez, another year has passed so quickly". My only regret is realising I should have started the habit much earlier.

[deleted]

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

#309

Post by 8fingerlouie »

exitb wrote: post #152
8fingerlouie wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that it helps you now, but i also keep all our family photos in the cloud (iCloud in my case), but at the same time i have a small ARM machine at home that keeps a mirror of the iCloud data. That ARM machine also has the responsibility of making backups, local to a USB drive, as well as to another cloud. Not mirrors, but proper versioned backups (as in Restic, Borg, Arq, Duplicacy, Kopia, etc). I also maintain a…

As a fellow small ARM machine owner, what's your strategy for getting the photos from iCloud? Is there a tool one shouldn't feel weird to give their iCloud credentials to?

I have recently switched to a M1 Mac Mini, and just have each family member sign in to that using Remote Desktop. It brings the added bonus of working as a content cache for anything iCloud.

My only gripe is that it downloads the shared photo album (new in iOS 16) once for each account, and when your photo library is 1.8TB, that suddenly becomes a lot of wasted space. When it comes to backing it up the backup software deduplicates the data, but not for the initial storage.

I really wish Apple would implement some kind of method for backing up photos stored in the cloud without the need for mirroring them.

Before the M1 I was using iCloud photo downloader ( https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do... ) on a Raspberry Pi 4 which also worked well, but in the end I got tired of iCloud credentials expiring every ~90 days, requiring each family member to login again through a console.

Considering the M1 idles at roughly 20% more than a RPi4 (M1 at 4.5W) it was an easy sell. I just got the cheapest model and added a large USB drive. Using a Mac also gives you the possibility of using something like Backblaze Personal with unlimited backup storage, if that’s your thing :-)

I use Healthchecks.IO ( https://healthchecks.io/ ) to keep an “eye” on the backup status (and other more mundane tasks like monitoring the power state of my summerhouse)

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

#310

Post by 8fingerlouie »

clevedotoner wrote: post #161
agotterer wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep everything in the cloud as well. Documents are either in GDrive / Dropbox and photos are in iCloud. For sensitive documents I created an encrypted disk image that I store in Dropbox and mount when I need access to it, which is pretty infrequent. I periodically backup content to a NAS and I backup the NAS to B2.

I use Insync since this seems to be one of the few softwares that works on both Windows as well as a Linux box. But it has crazy privacy concerns. I have been able to view documents uploaded on someone else's account on my Insync app! I have no idea how many folks have seen my documents/data.

Take a look at Cryptomator. If offers transparent encryption across windows, Linux and MacOS. Desktop clients are free, iOS/android costs a one time fee.
Post reply on HN