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Comment by travisporter | Hacker News Reader

Can you routinely and reliably back up iPhone photos to a NAS? I have a NAS but synlogy app is just not reliable

I found a tool to do just that, iCloud Photo Downloader[1] (tho you do need to have your photos backed up to iCloud).

I run it as a cron on my NAS, and the only intereaction I need to have with it is to give it a new 2FA code every ~2-3 months. Highly recommend it

[1]: https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...

> Can you routinely and reliably back up iPhone photos to a NAS?

The way I do it is slightly roundabout but works well — I sync to iCloud, which in turn syncs to my desktop, which I backup to my NAS from there.

(Important note: You'll need to turn on "Download Originals to this Mac" in Photo's Settings, otherwise you'll get hi-res proxies rather than bit-for-bit source images.)

PhotoBackup rsyncs your photos and is free (a nag pop up at the end, that’s it). You have to trigger it manually, however:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/photobackup-backup-photos-and-...

I highly recommend PhotoSync for iOS. I believe it’s about $25-$40 for a lifetime license. It’s hugely configurable in terms of targets, triggers, and schedules for upload. But most importantly to me, it’s been rock solid and I’ve never run into an issue with it. Only thing to remember is to open it once upon reboot. Works brilliantly after that.

Seconded. I don’t keep photos on my phone for very long, instead I regularly upload them to a self-hosted PhotoPrism instance via PhotoSync.

Make sure to check the saved photos. I stopped using it after I found that random photos were blank after the export. It wasn't reliable, and I only backed up 20Gb, so not that much.

I definitely check it regularly because I’m insane; but in the years I’ve been using it I’ve thankfully never had the issue you describe.

With Google I have it set up to email me the Takeout download link every 2 months which I then download manually

https://takeout.google.com/

I recommend everyone who hasn't done it before, to hit the above url while logged in and firing off an export. It will respond back after some time with URLs you can download. Great for downloading your Youtube playlists and history.

BTW, Apple's version of Takeout is at privacy.apple.com. Once you log in, click on "Get a copy of your data".

Doesn't the takeout strip the metadata from the photos? Things like the location data. I vaguely remember looking into this in the past and from what I remember there was no good way around it.

I haven't seen any alternatives to Google Photos either. Ente might be most promising, but their iOS app is not great at actually automatically uploading photos.

Google Takeout dumps the files exactly how they were uploaded without any modifications. It then provides it's own info/metadata as a json file with the same name.

There are some situations where you may have entered geolocation data on the app/website and this will end up in the json file rather than embedded in the image file metadata. It's up to you to work out how you want to merge this back in.

That is good to know, thanks! I might be misremembering it. It has been a while since I looked at it.

I use the syno app just fine. I setup a geo boundary so that if I’m at home it backs up - for my wife’s phone it just happens in the background, for me though I have to open the app for some reason… so I do it every week or so.

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