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How do you sync/save your photos from your mobile phone? (automatic upload/manual)?
TL;DR: What's your approach to saving/syncing your photos from your phone to the cloud? (manual upload/automatic upload; automatic upload, then delete bad photos?..)
So, for the past 10 years I synced my photos to the unlimited photo storage of Google Photos and/or Amazon Photos. After Google Photos discontinued unlimited free storage and I cancelled Amazon Prime (which includes Photos), I moved on to making use of pCloud and Koofr (which I already have) as my primary photocloud. Now, there has something that has already been bugging me before and I just noticed it after the switch again. With the automatic photo sync enabled for pCloud/Koofr all the Photos I take on my phone get synced. I was able to de-select folders like Screenshots, DL, WhatsApp and others but often enough it's still shitty photos that get synced (e.g. I took a picture of some product in the supermarket, some blurry sideshot, or something else I'll probably never wanna see again). With the "unlimited" storage of Google and Amazon I probably just settled with "whatever", but even then I noticed how I was getting frustrated when scrolling through many bad photos in the cloud just to find that one good one to show it to a friend. That's why I was wondering: Why not do things differently, now that I moved to pCloud/Koofr. Why not manually upload photos, but this time only the good ones?
Then I thought: Hm, I'll probably have to sit down once a week/month and upload the good photos manually. Will I remember or just forget and worst case lose photos due to phone dying or being stolen while on holidays, which would result in the loss of awesome memories. Syncing to pCloud/Koofr and then deleting the bad ones doesn't seem ideal either, since at least pCloud will try to re-sync photos that I deleted online which kinda sucks. Having all photos as duplicates in pCloud/Koofr (e.g. sync automatically and have it in pCloud Sync folder, then copy good ones elsewhere) also kinda sucks.
How are you guys handling this?
Comments
I'm currently using Google Photos
Using about 8-9 GB of storage
Try Syncthing
It certainly was the best cloud photo app I have tried (Google Photos was best, Amazon Photos meh, pCloud/Koofr Gallery is kinda bad).
Have you tried selfhosting immich?
I've been thinking about setting up immich on my vps. Then i'll use rclone to mount my hostbrr storagebox. And then i'll have 1 TB of storage for my photos.
@Ympker
I am also using google photos. but I recently installed https://github.com/immich-app/immich on one of my servers.
it is very good.
although it still needs a little bit of polishing , As stated immich is under very heavy development at the moment. It will become a de-facto standart in the future for self hosting photo archives I guess.
immich-app on your phone can do manual backup , syncing or it can run as a background service, whatever you like.
I am using OneDrive for this, got an Microsoft 365 Family subscription, got all family members there (they have 1TB of storage each) and the app from my Android phone is doing backups to OneDrive. If the photo gets deleted from the phone, it will still be available in OneDrive.
I haven't yet, as I thought I'd just make use of pCloud/Koofr cloud storage I already have. But iirc Koofr/pCloud support rclone, so maybe I could self host immich on a small vps and use rclone to store the media on pCloud/Koofr.
I use icloud of which photos library Borg create to external HDD then restic to Backblaze
That's good to know. Do you upload all of DCIM and then delete photos you don't want on the cloud, or do you upload specific albums/folders with curated photos?
Right now I am uploading every DCIM I am doing and after I delete the photos I don't want (I didn't did that until now because I am too lazy for this) but, you can set the app to backup photos when you have the phone on charging or only Wi-Fi connection. If that set, you can just delete the photos from local gallery until they get into the cloud.
I use folder sync pro to sync DCIM folder directly to s3. So far so good using minio protocol to dump my phone media to storj.
It can be used for pcloud and koofr too, but never try
This morning I deleted my Storj account because they implemented minimum usage per month, which is 5$.
Yap, I also considering to move.
I plan to move my photos from Google photo to something else. Dump it to storj or glacier is an option.
Last photos backup show me about 600-700 GB. Still cheap to use storj compared to something like R2, and after I sum the usage with my backup file, it already near 1TB anyway. Close to their minimum usage.
I still searching how I can manage the photo inside storj, since I already solved the backup by using folder sync pro
Anyone knows apps to do that?
Actually also considering nextcloud with storj backend and use its android apps to sync the photo, but seems troublesome to maintain the nextcloud itself
I was using it between my 2 PCs, did not know existed for Android.
Just set-it up in my mobile, seems to work fine as well (excepted did not work when VPN is up). Thank you for the hint!
Fair enough. The WiFi requirement for upload might be a good idea.
+1 immich
Super stable inspite of heavy development and support from community.
Just works.
The team is open to new feature requests and community is friendly to support.
Sure it has its quirks (like not possible to know if a photo is duplicate before uploading) as its by design.
For me just works.
I was taking the lazy path with google photos the last few years, and I am also tired of the sub pricing hike.
regarding the self-hosted approach tho, is there any encrypted-at-rest feature? you know, after the charityhost thing, that would be years of private photos getting snooped, just can't risk it.
I've tried immich but initial phone backup crashes constantly
Hello,
I use a personal home server (old desktop pc repurposed as server) and I use Nextcloud for all the backup purpose. Nextcloud has both iOS and android app and both supports auto backup like iCloud or Google Photos.
Nextcloud doesn't have a feature rich photo viewing experience, atleast to my liking, with its present photo app, so in addition to nextcloud, I use PhotoPrism (which pulls data from nextcloud) as my online gallery, face detection, album management and such.
I started with an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 based PC and presently using a HP Z230 with Intel Core i7 4790 based business PC as my home server.
My ISP uses CG-NAT, although I do have an option to ask for Static Public IPv4, but I figured it's better for security to use a VPS and OpenVPN tunnel to forward all 80/443 request to my local server (in a VM running nginx reverse proxy) for external online access.
Thanks.
install foldersync + wireguard on phone. wireguard + samba on server. sync over smb/wireguard. this is on android. if you're on ios, you're screwed and have to pay apple to backup your photos.
You know the reason Google Photos offer unlimited wasn't out of the kindness of their heart or to get people used to drive storage.
They were using the photos to train their AI (now Gemini). They've collected tons of photos for free for about a decade under their TOS that gave them permission to use it to train it to identify and categorise your photos.
Similart to recaptcha (which google bought) - originally intended to train AI to read and transcribe books, Google bought it and started using it to train AI on how to detect road signs to use for Google Maps and its predicted some sort of self-driving car tech (apple and amazon are all investing in this). Now google is going to be charging for recaptcha use.
If I was a billionaire I'd put a couple million to offering free storage space for the masses, in exchange for the rights to train on the data - write the entire thing off as a charitable expense to the public. Free storage for the public, monetized by training on their photo data, sell the application of the AI to commercial businesses to offset costs...
In the moment my limit for personal usage is up to 200gb on a vps. And iPhone videos in 4k (I work with video) are heavy about the weight,
200gb for 4k videos is not enough, so I prefer a small portable drive with a size of simple usb flash in my wallet.
I'm a self hosted nextcloud sync of all photos I take but not videos unless on wifi. Once a month or so I go thru and delete the media I don't want long term. I can browse and share and slideshow at will. When a new app starts storing photos nextcloud app will ask me what I want to do. This is on android.
They now have a memories app that does the advanced photos things, like an iPhone, but my tags/dates need work for 25+ years of photos to make it perfect so I can't comment on memories