I really like Seafile for this functionality. I host my own server using podman to run their docker container and it works super well. Their app has the ability to back up any photos/videos taken on your phone, in addition to other things it can do. Highly recommend!
Just curious, when people say selfhosted does it imply they control the hardware at their home? Or does buying a VM from an operator count as self hosting?
I agree, both could be considered 'selfhosting'. But in my case I am running on hardware in my house!
Immich is making fast progress and is a great alternative to PhotoPrism for pictures, since the UI is more similar to Google Photos. Just the memory usage is still a bit high.
At https://pikapods.com, we revenue share with the author (Alex) and provide hosting for less technical users. So hoping to see it grow and improve further.
I use photoprism, but tbh photoprism rarely correctly identifies faces and labels content. I can’t tell if it’s just a limitation of the algorithm or if I’m running into a limitation of the database, because photoprism also has this issue where it automatically runs MySQL, but it doesn’t recommend using MySQL. So you have to make your own MariaDB, but then migrating from MySQL to MariaDB is this whole process I don’t wanna go through.
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…
If you are on iOS, PhotoSync works great. It's just a backup app but supports a ton of different endpoints (I use sftp), scheduling, and most importantly to me custom naming. iOS photo names are dogshit and renaming them to be time-stamped it amazing.
I use an app called PhotoSync on iOS and use that to sync my stuff to whatever backup solution I use. Currently that’s photoprism but it can do all kinds of stuff like WebDAV, file system, Dropbox etc Highly recommend that app
+1
It's so simple but also extensive. AND the "pro" version (what ever IAP they have) supports Apple Family Sharing so anyone in the family can use it.
Honestly, I know it's not cool, but OneDrive is my go to here. Syncs Photos to my server, which then copies them to a local (non cloud syncing) folder, which is then indexed with Picasa. Works a treat and requires zero intervention, although is based on a) MS software and b) deprecated Google software, so may not work forever.
I actually don't mind OneDrive - its decent enough, and i already pay a small monthly family subscription (because partner and offspring prefer MS Office - bleh). But, the hard block is that all of my daily driver machines are linux, and there is no native, MS-supported onedrive client for linux. (Yes, i know there are a couple of popular onedrive clients, but no thanks.) So, you know what i did a few years ago? I setup Nextcloud...then tested things out, and it worked great! So, now i have no desire to ever use onedrive on linux, thanks to NextCloud! But, i don't expect others to follow me along.
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.
rsync for me :-) God bless the wonderful people who gift so much incredible software to the world <3
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 was able to backup my iPhone photos (stored on device) to Window using Dokany, ifuse and rclone. This have one caveat though: if you are using iCloud, some of your photos are actually stored as low resolution copies of the original to save space on your device, so original will be not backed up.
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 have a Synology NAS and it has a Photos app that is essentially a Google photos clone. It has face recognition, tags, albums, auto backup from phone, etc.
Works pretty well, although I wasn't seeking it out or researching other options
I use Nextcloud, seems to work fine. Does images, files, calendars and contacts.
I also use nextcloud, but I've been planning on trying out immich. I used to use google photos and the migration to nextcloud left a lot to be desired. There doesn't seem to be a way to "free up space" the same way google photos could automatically delete already backed-up photos, so i have to do that manually periodically. But crucially the scrolling / thumbnail performance of the nextcloud photos timeline is terrible even with an SSD cache in my synology as well as running NC previously on an overpowered rack mount server, of course using redis with NC and all the usual optimization tips. Thumbnails take a few seconds to load making it near impossible to track down photos from more than 6 months ago.
The thing that stood out to me about immich was how when I first saw a show-off post on /r/selfhosted, it included a video showing how instant the thumbnails loaded as well as some background on how they were focusing on optimizing the scrolling performance and ensuring blurred thumbnails would be available asap when scrolling. I was impressed at how it stacked up to the experience of using google photos.