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Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage

markpitblado.me

51–60 of 137 posts

Re: Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage

#51

It drives me crazy that it shards your photos all over the place in opaquely named directories so you can’t actually find anything without its database index. Photoprism is the best one I’ve found that will just take and index your folders as they are.

What do you mean opaquely named directories? It’s yyyy/yyyy-MM-dd/originalFileName. Those opaquely named files are the thumbnails.

Immich will also index your folders as they are. It’s called “External Libraries” in the documentation.

Re: Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage

#53
post #38

I use Immich, but saved me money it has not. Unless you actually go through the "Backing up your photos" step, you _will_ lose your photos, it's just a matter of time. And if you're like most people, that is probably not acceptable. And by the time you do the math for the cost of your backups, you'll find Google Photos pricing is actually pretty good. Still worth it, imo.

Google takeout is pretty good with exporting photos.

Last I checked Takeout is a single zip file. Once you have a photo repository of a certain size, that approach becomes difficult, no?

Re: Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage

#54

I use Immich, but saved me money it has not. Unless you actually go through the "Backing up your photos" step, you _will_ lose your photos, it's just a matter of time. And if you're like most people, that is probably not acceptable. And by the time you do the math for the cost of your backups, you'll find Google Photos pricing is actually pretty good. Still worth it, imo.

People setting up homelab often talk about money saved but never account for the time they have to spend as well not just in setting it up and maintainence. If you value your time, the cost of a google pro subscription is not much. I still run a homelab because I like it and yes its good to be able to run several services for "free" but the commitment is never free.

This is also true for businesses. I used to think why do companies don't use open source and save so much on infrastructure costs etc but in reality those costs don't really matter to them and self-hosting costs in terms of time and resources do add up + no gurantee as provided by enterprise level services etc.

Re: Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage

#55
post #27
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it not be accessible to your family? Immich allows sharing links

It is possible in general, but almost everybody doing self hosting (and as outlined in the article) does it on a local network and not on the internet. Most people that self host don't want to have to be a sysadmin in their free time in order to have a reasonable risk of not leaking all your families photos to the internet.

There is an immich proxy project: https://github.com/alangrainger/immich-public-proxy

I wouldn't make the instance itself public, but I think this is a decent tradeoff. Of course still requires one to be a sysadmin.

Re: Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage

#56
post #53
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google takeout is pretty good with exporting photos.

Last I checked Takeout is a single zip file. Once you have a photo repository of a certain size, that approach becomes difficult, no?

They do also split up to 2GB archives. So they are very manageable

Re: Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you can use this and pay no dollar per month for an accessible indexed search of 12+ months of photos, not used to train AI models.

Yes, I already pay no dollar per month for storing my photos in a folder and it's not used to train any AI model.

I don't understand these types of comments. It's clear you don't value the features Immich provides. Can you not imagine someone else valuing them?

What are you trying to communicate to us? Maybe you are just trying to tell people that they can get away with simpler solution if all they care about is unscheduled photo backup. If so, I feel there is a less antagonistic way for you to say it.

Re: Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage

#58

I use Immich, but saved me money it has not. Unless you actually go through the "Backing up your photos" step, you _will_ lose your photos, it's just a matter of time. And if you're like most people, that is probably not acceptable. And by the time you do the math for the cost of your backups, you'll find Google Photos pricing is actually pretty good. Still worth it, imo.

People setting up homelab often talk about money saved but never account for the time they have to spend as well not just in setting it up and maintainence. If you value your time, the cost of a google pro subscription is not much. I still run a homelab because I like it and yes its good to be able to run several services for "free" but the commitment is never free. This is also true for businesses. I used to think w…

Eh, once it's set up the maintenance cost is minimal. Cron'd backups and such and you won't have to worry.

Re: Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage

#59

I use Immich, but saved me money it has not. Unless you actually go through the "Backing up your photos" step, you _will_ lose your photos, it's just a matter of time. And if you're like most people, that is probably not acceptable. And by the time you do the math for the cost of your backups, you'll find Google Photos pricing is actually pretty good. Still worth it, imo.

People setting up homelab often talk about money saved but never account for the time they have to spend as well not just in setting it up and maintainence. If you value your time, the cost of a google pro subscription is not much. I still run a homelab because I like it and yes its good to be able to run several services for "free" but the commitment is never free. This is also true for businesses. I used to think w…

This is exactly the reason why companies aren't just going to vibe-code their own software. It's more expensive to maintain than it is just to pay for it outright

Re: Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage

#60

I use Immich, but saved me money it has not. Unless you actually go through the "Backing up your photos" step, you _will_ lose your photos, it's just a matter of time. And if you're like most people, that is probably not acceptable. And by the time you do the math for the cost of your backups, you'll find Google Photos pricing is actually pretty good. Still worth it, imo.

is nas + backup to amazon glacier a good solution?

Yes. Should have 1 onsite + 1 offsite backup ideally.
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