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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

#91

Post by semi-extrinsic »

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?

For cold / glacial backups, M-disc will run you $200 for 10x 100GB discs, plus around $300 for a pair of USB Blu-ray burners. With that, your data up to 500 GB can be written in duplicates and stored at two physical locations (one drive at each location), with very strong guarantees that it will be readable far into the future.

If you write 2 additional disks per year, this is a $500 initial investment plus $20 per year. Compared to Google's "AI Plus" plan you break even in year 5, assuming Google keeps pricing flat.

Of course you don't get any cloud access or similar.

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

#92

Post by Computer0 »

orev wrote: post #87
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.

“You _will_ lose them”, as in, somehow Immich will do something to lose them (like making a mistake in a dedupe process which deletes the wrong things), or are you just saying you also need to keep backups?

More so that any storage system will eventually fail me thinks.

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

#93

Post by drdexebtjl »

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?

I wouldn’t back up directly to Glacier, because you want to be able to verify your backups, and reading from Glacier is expensive.

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

#94

Post by swed420 »

buran77 wrote: post #89
swed420 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, c…

> I would call it more of a set of tradeoffs This is mostly wording. It is a commitment, it has an opportunity cost, there are tradeoffs. > This is the refreshening opportunity for us non-admins, and a learning opportunity to automate as much of it as possible. So many opportunities but the day is still 24 hours long. You still have to choose your opportunities wisely, and give up something else in the process. And i…

> This is mostly wording

Right, but the distinction is relevant in the context of the original claim:

> People setting up homelab often talk about money saved but never account for the time they have to spend

My point was that many of us do account for this time in the aforementioned ways.

Plus, once it's set up, it practically runs itself if you have a sane backup methodology and are only running upgrades every couple months.

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

#95

Post by rc5150 »

buran77 wrote: post #89
swed420 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, c…

> I would call it more of a set of tradeoffs This is mostly wording. It is a commitment, it has an opportunity cost, there are tradeoffs. > This is the refreshening opportunity for us non-admins, and a learning opportunity to automate as much of it as possible. So many opportunities but the day is still 24 hours long. You still have to choose your opportunities wisely, and give up something else in the process. And i…

If you have to jump through this set of hoops to come to the conclusion that you want to outsource the effort of self-admin, just save the trouble and deal with not being the target audience.

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

#96

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#97

Post by nickthegreek »

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…

But its all under 1 roof and can be taken from you in a fire or be stolen?

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

#98

Post by Manglo »

I have google photos and pay 10$ / Month.

I also have a zfs based fileserver setup were i do snapshots before i backup from my desktop were i manage my pictures.

I backup my zfs based filesystem online for off-side.

My images (a lot of pictures, dslr quality, raw) is around 2tb.

You don't just replicate what a company like Google does for you for 10$ and without knowing stuff about...

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

#99

Post by nickthegreek »

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…

Good news, my coding agents can access my proxmox and HA and immich and make having a homelab easier than it ever has been. I actually just used codex to help me find dupes across multiple user libraries in immich and quarantine them. In immich, I can only dedupe across a single user library. I used codex to find grid based images that I needed to convert into animated images from back in my iphone 4 days. It located the images, wrote software to convert to webp and handled it.

Codex reviewed my immich setup and recommended I change things the clip model, came up with a better backup strat and found holes in my system.

My codex will ADB into my NVIDIA Shield and proxmox and setup accounts, install packages, create Home Assistant integrations to tie it all together. As a hobbyist, these are things that I would never even think about taking on.

I bought a hdmi-cec controller for my projector last week. Firmware didnt work with the PX3-pro, but it was tied to my ESPHome. Codex diagnosed the issue, rewrote, tested and uploaded the firmware OTA. All done from my phone while I was waiting in line at a store.

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

#100

Post by bs7280 »

altmanaltman wrote: post #77
bs7280 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sen…

It definitely can, but Its easier than ever to fork an older version and modify with claude, or just switch to a different OSS provider. With commercial tools there's no rolling back. In fact, I would pay money to go back to the pre Allen Dye liquid ass IOS update.
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