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

markpitblado.me

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

#71

Post by pkulak »

dominotw wrote: post #50
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.

is nas + backup to amazon glacier a good solution?

Yes, but it's hard. I've not found something that works well with glacier, because most backup solutions want to write state, modify files immediately, etc, and glacier can't do that. It would need to be an append-only backup; strictly.

I do a bit of a hybrid. Borg to expensive, always available storage, but really large stuff that rarely changes and is less important, I exclude and manually throw in glacier once a year or so. Think, all your blue-ray rips, etc.

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

#72

Post by oftenwrong »

Noaidi wrote: post #35

As a retired semi-professional photographer I find it amazing how many photos some people have in their library. A mother with over 200GB of photos, 80% are junk, repeats, etc. She never looks at them either. Most people would not need the storage they are using if the just took less photographs and edited more, but good on Immich.

That's me in a nutshell. I have close to 300GiB in Google Photos, mostly photos and videos of my children. I take a lot of photographs because getting a good shot, for me, is mostly a matter of luck. I don't delete that many photos because it's active work and I don't really care to spend the time. I do curate an album of decent ones, just so the few people who care can see new photos and videos every now and then. I pay a relatively small fee for 2 TiB of space.

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

#73

Post by bilalq »

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.

Yeah. I actually love Google Photos as a product. I just want Immich as a safety net in case Google ever feels like locking me out of my account on a random Tuesday.

I haven't really found a guide or discussions on how best to use Immich in this mirroring way. Admittedly, I haven't looked very hard. Setting up Immich is something that's been on my todo list for years now.

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

#74

Post by altmanaltman »

Banditoz wrote: post #58
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…

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

Yes I would consider my system optimal in terms of backup process etc. But I still tinker with it, try out new things, maintain the machines itself, it is a hobby. And it does consume time for me at least. But either way, I am sure a google pro subscription is still cheaper for me than the time value of setting up and maintainence, in the sense we are talking about saving money in real terms

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

#75

Post by ishtanbul »

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…

I’d be shocked if anyone running a homelab was really saving much if any money. From personal experience, it has snowballed into a never ending science project of upgrading and tinkering which i enjoy but it probably costing me multiples of cloud subscriptions. I just find it fun and like to learn, and love to diy.

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

#76

Post by oftenwrong »

The greatest weakness of Google Photos is that it has no real incremental, automated backup features. If it could incrementally sync over to other services, it would be much better. The closest is to manually use Google Takeout to export specific time ranges, and then copy those elsewhere.

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

#77

Post by altmanaltman »

bs7280 wrote: post #66
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…

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 (requirin…

yes makes sense but don't you think that risk will also extend to OSS? I get there's more freedom and people can always fork but I have experienced several open source projects go to garbage as well and forced me to switch to another service.

And yes Google had gotten progressively every year that I have been a paying customer as well so I am not against your point either. All I am saying is sometimes cloud makes sense financially as well even though open source allows you to do it for free technically. Enshiftication is the word of our age for everything imo unfortunately

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

#78

Post by megagpt5 »

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.

What's the math for the cost of getting banned from Google for some stupid AI reason?

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

#79

Post by swed420 »

altmanaltman wrote: post #70
swed420 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 becom…

> yes but there is still an opportunity cost

I would call it more of a set of tradeoffs

> a lot of the time is spent on doing menial system admin tasks

This is the refreshening opportunity for us non-admins, and a learning opportunity to automate as much of it as possible.

Other benefits not mentioned include not signing your data or life away to whatever Google's lawyers or marketers have decided is best for them, contributing to FLOSS even if only as an end user, not being a victim of rug-pulls...the list goes on.

Obviously this isn't for everybody, because there's no denying it takes time. The point is that for many, this is a very easy tradeoff to make when factoring in all of the other benefits.

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

#80

Post by spl757 »

ishtanbul wrote: post #75
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…

I’d be shocked if anyone running a homelab was really saving much if any money. From personal experience, it has snowballed into a never ending science project of upgrading and tinkering which i enjoy but it probably costing me multiples of cloud subscriptions. I just find it fun and like to learn, and love to diy.

I run all my own stuff local-first, but I am also a systems and networking engineer and understand all of the concepts so I can build it properly. It takes time, and the willingness to do so. If you don't already have the knowledge to set things like this up, and are really doing it to save money as a consumer, then Google Photos as a product is more of a fit and the user will definitely have a better experience.

For someone like me, it's easy and quick and I have a very robust incremental backup system with air-gapped copies. So it does save me money, because it only takes my time and knowledge.

There is no absolute answer, because it's subjective depending on the needs of the user.

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