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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

#331

Post by post-it »

dangus wrote: post #136
post-it wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the Apple TV should do it.

Okay, crazy idea. What if you didn't even need a piece of hardware and the service included online storage? It would simplify it even more for the end user so they didn't have to plug in hardware and maintain it. We could call this service something like eOnlineStorage or iBackupPhotos, maybe charge a varying price up to $9.99 a month for it.

Box would be a one-time purchase. There's no maintenance involved - if it breaks, you just buy a new one and log in, and redownload all of your data from your friends.

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

#332

Post by fletchowns »

abwizz wrote: post #272
fletchowns wrote: post #194

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?

I am using Nextcloud for sync in conjunction with PhotoPrism.

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

#333

Post by cvwright »

gobip wrote: post #291
cvwright wrote: post #22

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…

Why not go for immich, and try adding the E2E on top? Immich will encrypt the pictures before sending them on the server, and decrypt them when trying to access them, local thumbnails, etc. That could work?

I think it’s much easier to take a system that has working, audited E2E encryption, and add photo management on top of that.

In other words, I think the E2EE is the bigger lift, and the photo stuff is the easier piece to re-implement.

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

#334

Post by jrm4 »

ghgr wrote: post #203
jrm4 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big fan of PiGallery3. Looks like pretty much any "native phone" gallery and respects folders, which is pretty much all I need.

I'm very satisfied with PiGallery2. I'd love to try PiGallery3, but I can't find it. Could you share the link for the project, or was it a typo? (hope not!)

Lol, kind of a typo. For some reason in my head it really was PiGallery3? I do mean 2.

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

#335

Post by pathartl »

mordae wrote: post #219
Mashimo wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a simple file sync service. It has object and face detection. Metadata indexing / searching and multi user support.

Multiuser support is free, face detection is cheap enough embedded camera chips do it, metadata indexing is cheap with any recent DB engine, search is cheap with them as well. The only computationally expensive thing here is face matching. Photoprism recommends two cores and 3G RAM and claims to be able to run on a NAS.

It's not just face detection. It does some level of object detection as well.

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

#336

Post by dangus »

post-it wrote: post #331
dangus wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, crazy idea. What if you didn't even need a piece of hardware and the service included online storage? It would simplify it even more for the end user so they didn't have to plug in hardware and maintain it. We could call this service something like eOnlineStorage or iBackupPhotos, maybe charge a varying price up to $9.99 a month for it.

Box would be a one-time purchase. There's no maintenance involved - if it breaks, you just buy a new one and log in, and redownload all of your data from your friends.

Who is paying for the hard drives?

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

#337

Post by dangus »

mulmen wrote: post #175
dangus wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Y'all are literally unironically pitching The Box from the TV show Silicon Valley. What is the problem being solved here? Apple already offers a solution – iCloud. Why would they want to sell you a box for offline backups?

The problem being solved here is data locality. This idea predates the TV show by literally decades. Apple doesn’t want to sell us a box. They want to sell us a subscription. My assertion is that Apple’s model of selling hardware would work for home servers.

I repeat myself: focus your mind on the value, or the problem the customer is looking to solve. Data locality isn’t a problem, it’s an implementation choice or detail.

The problem is something like: “I need to keep my family photos/files safe” or “I need to store customer orders and data” or “I need a way to protect my data when I drop my phone in the toilet.”

Even giant companies with eye-watering IT budgets see the appeal of having someone else manage their physical hardware and software infrastructure.. I haven’t worked at a company that owned its own servers in nearly a decade.

Apple doesn’t want to sell us a box and coincidentally nobody wants to buy a box.

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

#338

Post by gsich »

scarface_74 wrote: post #76
barbazoo wrote: post #46

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?

I have absolutely no desire to manage my own backup. When I take a picture with my phone, it automatically gets backed up to iCloud, Google Photos, OneDrive, and Amazon Photos (free with prime). When I had a personal computer, photos would sync to my computer and get backed up to BackBlaze also.

>I have absolutely no desire to manage my own backup.

So you have no backup.

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

#339

Post by climb_stealth »

vishnumohandas wrote: post #234
climb_stealth wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Google Photos works on iOS. And I presume they would be as much a third party app as anyone else. So it is possible. From what I remember reading in the past it is possible to get wakeup events for GPS location changes. I think that's one trick to get an app to run in the background. I agree though. It's a shame how iOS is completely crippling background apps. I'm hoping for an alternative for Google Photos and…

Hey, one of the devs building ente.io here. Thanks for pointing out the workaround with GPS, will look into it! Currently on iOS, our servers send silent pushes to your device every hour. This wakes up the app and gives us 30 seconds to execute a background sync (provided you've previously not killed the app). This is not sufficient to backup videos, but it works pretty well for incremental backup of photos (I person…

Oh, hey! ente.io is super promising! Have been following and paying for it for 2 years now :)

> This wakes up the app and gives us 30 seconds to execute a background sync (provided you've previously not killed the app).

I wonder if this is the crux of the matter. It doesn't work when the app hasn't been started in the first place, right? I don't know how Google Photos does it, but I'm pretty sure they have solved syncing without having to remember to open the app. I half wonder whether they achieve this by showing constant notifications about "look what happened x years ago" or "look at this new collage" that gets people to click on it and actually start the app.

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

#340

Post by mulmen »

dangus wrote: post #337
mulmen wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem being solved here is data locality. This idea predates the TV show by literally decades. Apple doesn’t want to sell us a box. They want to sell us a subscription. My assertion is that Apple’s model of selling hardware would work for home servers.

I repeat myself: focus your mind on the value, or the problem the customer is looking to solve. Data locality isn’t a problem, it’s an implementation choice or detail. The problem is something like: “I need to keep my family photos/files safe” or “I need to store customer orders and data” or “I need a way to protect my data when I drop my phone in the toilet.” Even giant companies with eye-watering IT budgets see the…

Home hosting protects from institutional threats like governments, TLAs, and LEO. Cloud providers can’t offer that. They’re a huge target and it’s an open secret they are compromised. Apple even tried to pitch that as a feature. And they’re the leaders in privacy!

It’s easy to reason about data locality. I can have a literal social network of just my actual friends and no tech company gets to spy on it.

Cloud backups are still good for disaster recovery if they are fully encrypted.

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