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Self-hosted photo and video backups directly from your mobile phone

github.com

51–60 of 354 posts

Re: Self-hosted photo and video backups directly from your mobile phone

#51
post #28

Trying to get off dropbox. 1) Anyone try Backblaze for photo backups? Is it worth trying? 2) Why is immich photo and video only? 3) Why docker? I miss the days of just files and scripts on any host.

>> 1) Anyone try Backblaze for photo backups? Is it worth trying? Yes, happy customer for many years. Restored ~2GB of photos when a MacBook Pro motherboard completely died about 18 months ago.

Sorry, of course that should be ~2TB (not GB)

Re: Self-hosted photo and video backups directly from your mobile phone

#52
post #35

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.)

Are you using SyncThing on iOS?

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.

Re: Self-hosted photo and video backups directly from your mobile phone

#53
post #35

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.)

+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.

Very freeing.

Re: Self-hosted photo and video backups directly from your mobile phone

#54
post #35

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.)

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 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.

Re: Self-hosted photo and video backups directly from your mobile phone

#55
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you using SyncThing on iOS?

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.

> probably for some security reason

While I'm sure this is probably true, the number of features Apple is depriving us from due to alleged "security reasons" is baffling.

It's a general excuse among firms that want to keep their monopoly and walled garden (OpenAI does the same).

Re: Self-hosted photo and video backups directly from your mobile phone

#56

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…

PhotoSync does not have autobackup for iOS last time I tried. Did this change?

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.

Re: Self-hosted photo and video backups directly from your mobile phone

#57
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m working on building something similar. 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 exi…

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.

Re: Self-hosted photo and video backups directly from your mobile phone

#58
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 comi…

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.

Re: Self-hosted photo and video backups directly from your mobile phone

#59
post #35

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.)

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.

[1] https://photostructure.com/

Re: Self-hosted photo and video backups directly from your mobile phone

#60

This looks like something that I might use, but > 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

Considering it also says “still under active development. Don’t use this yet for backups” I think it’s pretty fair.

It’s explicitly saying it’s not a backup solution.

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