Ask HN: How do you store photos and videos?

My workflow doesn't address your primary problem of reclaiming storage; I've addressed that with buying more local storage: I rely on two TrueNAS servers and Backblaze B2.

The primary TrueNAS server has a dataset for photos and is served via Samba share that I mount, as my primary access point across devices. Lightroom points to this share for the photos, and iCloud for Windows downloads new photos and videos to this share, as well.

On a weekly basis, that dataset is replicated to the secondary server and also synced to B2 via `rclone`. I do make use of the `rclone crypt`[0] option before pushing to B2, where the filenames are scrambled. There's no particular reason for this, other than it's how I first set it up years ago and haven't needed to change it. I have practiced file recoveries periodically to ensure I can still access my photos via `rclone`.

Assuming you have a Mac paired with your iPhone, I'd consider iCloud for the usability wins for your requirements. You can toggle the setting to download original resolution photos for the desktop Photos app and backup the resulting files separately. Perhaps to Glacier.

[0] https://rclone.org/crypt/

I also use TrueNAS as the main place for storing everything that matters. It is also backed up to Backblaze B2 but using restic instead of rclone.

Having a local NAS with RAID redundancy, a filesystem with checksums and backed up properly brings much better peace of mind than relying on proprietary solutions like iCloud or Google drive.

I’ve read that you aren’t supposed to use iCloud photos on a NAS (which is heck of a problem with the small SSD drives in MacBooks these days)

I run a Nextcloud instance on a $15 dedicated Atom server, 2x2TB of RAID-1, fully encrypted, with in-file OCR full text search and external backup (compressed and encrypted to Coldline) plug-ins, completely replaces Google Drive or iCloud and my data is mine alone - the peace of mind of no one having access to your data or even scraping your pictures is priceless. And the iOS app is really good and even uploads pictures I take automatically.

If the 2TB ever turn out to be too little, you can simply attach any S3-like or NFS volume to it, or just upgrade to bigger storage servers. You can get dedicated servers with 4x4TB HDD + 512GB NVMe system disk for 60 bucks or so, which in RAID-5 is almost completely on par with the cheapest cloud storage solutions like Backblaze or Wasabi, although I guess at some point you probably want RAID-10.

I gamble with the devil.

They sit on a 14 TB HDD.

Of that about 70% of my photos are backed up to Glacier, but the remaining 20% needs to be culled (lots of repeated shots from camera high speed burst mode, bad shots etc) before I put them up on the cloud and incur the cost for them.

What I really need to do is automate my system i.e.:

- Plug in XQD card - Automatically generate a "contact sheet" of jpegs at a 1920 x 1080 resolution. These photos I allow me to keep every shot at a low cost. These come in at about 6-10MB vs the 70MB+ raw file - Auto backup to glacier whenever I rate a photo 3 stars or higher in Lightroom

This is something I haven't sold yet but been looking for a long time.

I want my photos available offline next to me on a 2nd drive + online too with mobile access 1:1 (I mean exact 1:1 copy) and instant shareability. Honestly Dropbox would be sooooo perfect, it's exactly what I want but €9.99/month for 2TB is just overkill for me. I'm talking about like 50GBs of stuff maximum. Tried iCloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Drive too but the files didn't end up being exact copies (like either some EXIF data, or the dates have been modified). And iCloud Drive doesn't even allow you to share photos unless you share with iOS people. MS OneDrive felt clunky too me. I really think Dropbox is a great service and wish they were offering something low profile focusing on average people and not... enterprise groups?

I'll probably end up paying for Dropbox but I still feel it's an overkill

We use adobe Lightroom with extra cloud storage. My wife has a nice ui to search and browse the photo's on every device (just login on the same account).

I have a extra copy of the photo's and videos in a dropbox folder for safe keeping. The less accessed the less space that uses.

It works (tm) it does mean I have two subscriptions to pay.

SmugMug will give you unlimited photo storage for as little as $6.25 US per month (if you pay yearly). There are official apps for iOS and macOS (as well as other platforms) that support auto upload. You can easily share your account with your wife.

While the default SmugMug experience emphasizes publicly sharing your photos via a personalized photo site, you can just set everything to private, leave the website empty, and use the private Photo Library and Organizer features to manage your photos. The Photo Library provides a great UI for browsing and searching on the web (including mobile devices), and the iOS app offers a fast native iOS browsing and searching experience.

Full disclosure: I work for SmugMug!

https://www.smugmug.com/plans

The listed price for the lowest tier is $132 per year, which is around $11 per month. What’s the $6.25 option?

Whoops, I probably should have known better than to mention specific pricing since it can vary based on local taxes (such as VAT), and because we test different plans from time to time. But if you're interested in the lower tier plan I mentioned and you're not seeing it on the site, feel free to email help@smugmug.com and ask for Jennifer, one of our Support Heroes. She'll take care of you!

If it’s detected my location correctly, it would be $7.50 a month. Colour me much-less-interested as a result of shenanigans-based pricing.

Mostly local since I have rather slow internet. Total amount is not all that large. I have a small Nextcloud on a low end VM, but you can get very large Nextcloud instances from Hetzner quite inexpensively (Storage Share). I use Borg for backups to Hetzner Storage Box and a few other places. I don't have any serious "workflow" for photos or videos. It's all just files. I would have to figure something out if I was generating a lot more, but for now it's no big deal. Most of my photos these days are taken with my phone, so I can easily share them to my Nextcloud. Sometimes if I want to upload a bigger bunch of files, I'll use an scp client that I got from f-droid.

Me & my wife use microsoft's cloud service (due to our historical addition to Windows Phone OS).

Then it's being sync'ed to our home NAS, which is manually turned on and connected to the Internet once in a while (like once per month or so) - it has 2 HDDs connected as a RAID (so there's a 2nd copy of the 1st one).

Besides that, every year close to Chrismas we're sitting together and selecting photos from last year we would like to print for ourselves and our relatives (which are then put into the album).

When our cloud storage is close to 100%, we're just wiping everything there,as delete procedure does not sync into our NAS (it was configured like that on purpose).

Right now, I'm using Google Photos for convenience, but it feels like they're feeding my photos to AI.

I'd happily pay for a Google Photos clone if anyone wants to make one.

Xiaomi seems to offer the same services, but they seem a little shadier than Google.

Three levels of storage:

1. iCloud: native sync from iPhone

2. Photoprism running on my home server backed by a ZFS dataset: photos synced periodically using Photosync (excellent app by the way!)

3. Backblaze B2: cron job syncs ZFS dataset using rclone

Multiple local USB3 HDDs syncing to Google Drive.

This is just a suggestion and not any form of shilling or promotion - Internxt is a decentralized cloud-based storage service that can assure you that your files are well-encrypted and only accessible by you; we have made some vast developments with the system that makes it easier to navigate and upload your files. We strongly encourage you to choose the proper storage for your files to avoid cyberattacks and losing your data to suspicious actors. Especially nowadays, threats are becoming more sophisticated, and huge companies have given data privacy less significance.