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

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

#61

Post by odo1242 »

drdexebtjl wrote: post #30

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.

In my case: I did the math and it would take me ~4-5 years to recoup the initial investment (of about $450) in my homelab (comparing my server + 3 copies of 2TB with the cost of a 2TB google drive subscription). (Also excludes the time spent building the server, and I found very good deals; if you get a regular NAS this becomes about ~10 years)

There is, however, a fixed component cost to building such a setup that gets amortized the more disks you buy- I believe it becomes worth it to use a NAS cost-wise over about ~5-6TB of data (and definitively worth it when you get into the tens of terabytes).

Or if you need low-latency storage / any type of performance - neither the cloud nor my homelab has removed my need for my portable NVMe drive

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

#62

Post by swed420 »

altmanaltman wrote: post #54
drdexebtjl wrote: post #30

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…

What you call a commitment, many call a hobby / learning / refreshening opportunity.

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

#63

Post by tehlike »

madduci wrote: post #56
adolph wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can change the split size. But yes.

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

#65

Post by tehlike »

adolph wrote: post #53
tehlike wrote: 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?

I exported something like 450GB photos in chunks of 50GB iirc.

Tip: export the takeout to Google drive then download it from there.

Otherwise link downloads have # of times you can retry before they are deleted.

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

#66

Post by bs7280 »

altmanaltman wrote: post #54
drdexebtjl wrote: post #30

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…

The way I see it, I am committing more time and hassle to setup my homelab now to save time, money, and hassle later when the SaaS alternate's inevitably do something hostile to me as the user.

Even before AI coding I did not trust big tech companies to make updates that have my best interests in mind. Many of these examples are weird feature or ux changes - like how spotify treats liked songs as a playlist (requiring more taps to like a song). Not the end of the world. But on the more extreme side, my gaming PC's windows installation has died via bad windows update twice now. I don't use it for anything important anymore. It's insane that my claude code driven homelab stack has allowed me to have better uptime than github.

Now in the AI coding era, its obvious to me that alot of the tools I am forced to use on a day to day basis are frequently shipped with slop, causing more bugs and all around jankier UX's. With my claude max subscription, im suddenly able to make tools perfectly tailored to what I want, and I can rest assured I wont wake up and find the equivalent of a bad IOS update.

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

#67

Post by odo1242 »

odo1242 wrote: post #61
drdexebtjl wrote: post #30

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.

In my case: I did the math and it would take me ~4-5 years to recoup the initial investment (of about $450) in my homelab (comparing my server + 3 copies of 2TB with the cost of a 2TB google drive subscription). (Also excludes the time spent building the server, and I found very good deals; if you get a regular NAS this becomes about ~10 years) There is, however, a fixed component cost to building such a setup that g…

(The other benefit of having a homelab is, of course, you can run services that aren’t limited to cloud offerings and run processing on the data locally)

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

#68

Post by pkulak »

drdexebtjl wrote: post #30

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.

Absolutely. I pay Borgbase $10 a month (about). I could probably get a huge storage limit in Google for that money.

But it's worth it to me to be answerable to no one. I can't, say, sign in to my Google account with an unlocked phone and get banned. Boom, photos gone, no matter how many backups Google made on my behalf. And if I'm gonna do a "takeout" every month and back that up; might as well host myself. Immich is also absolutely amazing software.

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

#69

Post by carlosjobim »

jaymmartin wrote: post #57
carlosjobim wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The only thing I wanted to communicate is that "easier than ever" shouldn't be anywhere in the article. Neither should really the part about saving money, but others have mentioned it, so I don't have to.

Otherwise I think Immich seems like a cool project, and I hope they're successful.

I added the part about putting photos in a folder, to at least contribute with a different solution, which for me has worked very well for very long.

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

#70

Post by altmanaltman »

swed420 wrote: post #62
altmanaltman wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What you call a commitment, many call a hobby / learning / refreshening opportunity.

yes but there is still an opportunity cost. As I said I still do it because I like it but I also have a life outside just computers. Any time i spend on my homelab is also time I take away from other things. Also there is learning but a lot of the time is spent on doing menial system admin tasks or helping solve "user problems" (i.e. figure out why my partner's friend cannot access jellyfin anymore). So it does become a chore over time and there is always a cost. You can justify it by saying you are getting value out of it but in my experience, this is true for every activity. Everyone has limited time and spending it importantly is important to me.
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