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

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

#311
post #78
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.)

How to backup iCloud photos? I have an iPhone and Windows as desktop.

I rely on iCloud for sync, but every few months I like to do a full backup of iCloud:

- Go to https://privacy.apple.com - Choose "Request a copy of your data" - Select iCloud Photos

After a few days you'll receive a download link to the full iCloud Photos library. Perhaps only available in EU (it's a GDPR-mandated feature).

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

#312
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+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 machin…

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!

Are you me? This is literally my setup. The one addition is rclone, which I used to back up my (encrypted) restic repos to Drive.

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

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#314
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interesting philosophy on this, hadn’t thought about it this way before.

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

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Personally I keep the last 365 days in my Google Photos Everything else is in Immich Pictures and videos I take get backed up to Google Photos Once a year I do a Google Takeout and import into Immich This way I get the best of both worlds

Do you lose the EXIF data in the photos when storing on Google Photos? That's my biggest annoyance.

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

#316
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How to backup iCloud photos? I have an iPhone and Windows as desktop.

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…

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.

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

#318
I've actually been looking for a good self hosted solution for pictures, that allows me to automatically upload pictures from my phones (I use both ios and android). I've been using nextcloud photos but honestly the experience of the photos app for nextcloud has always been bad for me.

I've been looking at immich and photoprism; how do the two compare, what are the advantages of immich over photoprism, and vice versa?

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

#319
post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#320
post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> but I don't need a complete copy of my photo reel to be saved to my device this resonates with me. what solution are you using?

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