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

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191–200 of 354 posts

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

#191
post #84
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Like https://umbrel.com/ ? (no affiliation)

Damn, this is pretty! I was thinking of self-building such a setup with a Mac Mini.

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

#192
post #7

What advantage does this have over nextcloud?

Nextcloud is built for generic files, so you'll not get all the "smart optimizations" for images. Immich is intelligent enough to serve you a decent enough compressed image at first, and load the full image in background while you start to stare at it. On the other hand, Nextcloud will show you a loading banner.

Immich also does use CLIP to cluster similar faces and so on. Not only that, geotagging, camera details etc.

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

#193
post #11
post #4

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 it…

It is a backup solution, the mobile app automatically backs up photos as you take them.

Sure, that is part of it. But it seems to offer a bit more than pure backup, which you could get with a number of services.

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

#194
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.)

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.

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

#195
post #18
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't used this, but it seems it has AI photo recognition stuff. So you can search for "fish" for example and it will show photos of fish. And apparently it has facial recognition, so you can find photos of a specific person by name. These are killer features of Google photos for me, so it is exciting to see them in a self hosted, open source offering. There is a demo linked on the GitHub page that I checked out:…

Nextcloud has face recognition iirc as well.

Oh cool, thanks. I meant to add that in my comment; It's probably not far off a decade since I looked at nextcloud, so my impression is very out of date!

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

#197
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.)

[deleted]

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

#198
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.)

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?

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

#199

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.

> 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)

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

#200
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

like a synology or qnap nas?

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.

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