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Comment by unexistential | Hacker News Reader

Photoprism is great at what it does but it's not a Google Photos alternative. It doesn't auto-backup photos from your phone like Google Photos.

I'm currently using Immich and although it's still a while away from having a stable release, it shows a great deal of promise. I like that it's being built with a clearly stated purpose of being a Google Photos alternative. It may never be as seamless or smooth as Google Photos, but I think it will be perfectly enough for privacy-conscious self-hosters.

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FWIW there are a _ton_ of apps for both iOS and Android that will back up your photos and videos to your home NAS/server. Whatever you go with, ensure the files aren't being mucked with during or after the transfer--Google Photos on Android may omit and/or change some metadata tags, for example.

I personally use Resilio Sync [1] (for iOS and Android) and have tested SyncThing [2] (for Android), and PhotoSync [3] (for iOS and Android). They all work well.

[1] https://www.resilio.com/individuals/ [2] https://syncthing.net/ [3] https://www.photosync-app.com/home.html

Thanks for the links! Didn’t know about these others. I’ve been using PhotoSync, but it’s automation options are kind of lackluster

Syncthing is an option, but it's typically for a different use case. Most people will want their photos backed up in a way that means they can delete the photos on their phone and still have a copy, but Syncthing would delete it on the NAS end as well.

There's an ignoreDelete option but the docs advise against using it[0] and IIRC the developers want to remove it.

[0] https://docs.syncthing.net/advanced/folder-ignoredelete.html

There is a one way sync. So I sync from various phones to my server for Digikam / Photoprism to consume

One way sync would stop your server syncing back to the phone, but wouldn't you still need the ignoreDelete option to stop deletions on your phone syncing to your server?

You know, I think you're right. Will have to test that.

The trick is to sync to the import folder and let photoprism import them, which removes them from that folder anyways. So your phone deletes have no effect, since the photos are not in the import folder anymore. I have my imports run every 10 minutes, so there is never a huge buildup of photos to process at once. It's been working great so far

Yeah, I do move them to Digikam's folders for processing, so not a risk of actual deletion.

Syncthing can do this and much more. Its the absolute best option to sync anything anywhere. It is very flexible, uses local connections, can only sync on wlan/certain wlans. The only thing that could be better is UX - for novel users its not so easy to understand. But people hanging out on HN should choose it as its just great!

I agree it's very good, and I use it for a lot of other folders eg notes, but I don't see how to use it as a backup tool for photos, without either using the option linked above or copying/hardlinking elsewhere on the NAS end. Unless there's a setting I'm missing that stops it from deleting on the NAS end?

EDIT: Don't get me wrong, it's my favourite file syncing tool, especially as one of the few open source syncing solutions. But I worry it always gets recommended as a backup tool and people don't realise it'll also sync deletions, so they'd suffer data loss.

Oh, I do use ignoreDelete. I additionally use git-annex on the receiving side, with the daemon running, so it automatically annexes the files and pushes to long term backup that way.

Syncthing doesn't run on iOS and despite having paid for PhotoSync it doesn't work right.

Resilio also doesn't appear to run on iOS.

Apple is very anticompetitive wrt iCloud Photos. There are not a ton on iOS.

There is no point talking about iOS, You don't use Apple devices if you value freedom and open source anyway.

Well, on the Apple device itself. I upload my photos to Wikimedia Commons.

What if you value privacy, smart guy?

Syncthing has been ported to iOS as Möbius Sync. https://www.mobiussync.com/ I used it for a while and it worked.

Nope; this is some $5 IAP nonsense. I refuse to support people who rentseek on top of f/oss.

The docs mention photosync to back up images

https://www.photoprism.app/partners

One thing I've done as well is to set up a simple script which gets run from a cron job and will let me know via email if it hasn't seen any new photos uploaded for 3 days (it's pretty unusual I'll go 3 days without taking a single photo on my phone). This provides a simple early warning for things like backup/sync apps getting killed by aggressive phone power management.

> It may never be as seamless or smooth as Google Photos, but I think it will be perfectly enough for privacy-conscious self-hosters.

This struck me... Us techy people should be able to use our knowledge to get more out of our tech setups.

But lately I've felt that opensource tooling has been falling behind. My mum can post a video to YouTube for everyone to see in seconds, but if I try to do the same with opensource tools, I will probably still be battling a bad transcode from ffmpeg that glitches on some family members phones and doesn't have sound for other viewers...

What glitches are there in ffmpeg? The problem here is a resource imbalance inherent in the difference between proprietary big tech platforms and often individual self-hosted software. While some of these self-hostable software are of high quality, these will never match the resources that Google or Facebook has. They can't afford to fix every issue in existence, because they are often volunteer projects making little to no money. Techy people understands this tradeoff, and proceeds with open source tools, because they are aware the situation that proprietary platforms can put them in and they would like to avoid it.

The glitch isn’t in ffmpeg, it’s in the receiving phone since you sent them a format which isn’t supported by that phone’s hardware decoder. The trick of youtube isn’t just a quick upload, it’s the auto transcoding to formats for anything that requests it over any arbitrary link speed.

Yep. And if the opensource world wanted to match that functionality, you would want ffmpeg to have an option to output all common formats, packaged together in a mega-file.

Then, when a user wants to watch a video, they could use HTTP range requests to download just the data they want to view from the megafile, in the format they need. If, midway through watching, their internet gets a bit slow, the browser could auto-switch to a different lower-res format. The megafile would have the necessary indexes etc to know which timestamps of which audio and video feeds are at which byte locations, and where keyframes are for easy switching.

Things like youtube have proprietary code to do this. But the opensource world doesn't have much comparable - at least nothing widely deployed to be able to just send a video to a friend, and know that whatever device and internet connection they have, they'll have a good experience.

Beyond that, since these projects are rarely usable enough to get a critical mass of non-technical users, they just morph into beautiful, powerful core applications wrapped in a janky, thin wrappers that people call a UI.

Well, make no mistake, the large ones use ffmpeg too ;) The secret is in the flags.

> This struck me... Us techy people should be able to use our knowledge to get more out of our tech setups.

You are going up against a probably 1000s strong team of equally techy people whose job it is to do what you are trying to cobble together. Unless there is a niche use case that you are trying to workaround, it is hard to solve a mainstream problem that isn't solved better by one of the Big Corps.

I was thinking about this. It would be great to have easy plug and play server services.

It would probably end up a mess like Wordpress plug-ins. But Wordpress works and it easyish for non technical people to set up..

Why wouldn’t you be falling behind? YouTube has tens of thousands of full time hackers. It’s the height of silliness to imagine that some disorganized hobbyists can match the experience.

It supports WebDAV, discusses that in the docs, and links to an app that does well enough at backing up a phone to start off. Not seamless like Google photos for sure, but not nothing. https://docs.photoprism.app/user-guide/sync/webdav/

Many people suggest that you can auto-backup with whatever other tool works, and indeed there are a few choices.

But that misses the point, which is that in Google Photos you can manage the same collection from the phone or from the web. Adding a pic to an album should feel the same, no matter whether the pic is already synced or not yet synced.

You can be the one who complain and yell at clouds, or the one who contribute for everyone to a better world.

I've already committed financially to Photoprism. Not that it is any of your business.

This does make sense as a more specific UX/workflow complaint, google photos and similar setups are going to do much better with that. You can use the PWA on mobile after the sync runs, but it's not going to be the same as native apps on mobile and server that manage syncing behind the scenes. So definitely a downside if most of your photo management happens on the phone.

I'm using photosync with photoprisim and it works fine to autosync photos off, with the only caveat being that i'll occasionally close the app and it won't run for a few days/weeks.

Not as seamless as iCloud Photos but it works great.

I use PhotoSync as well, I setup a shortcut/automation that runs it anytime I connect to home Wi-Fi, after a 30 second wait and SSID check to prevent false positives.

I still have to click the notification, due to iOS limitations but having the notification show serves as a good reminder to run it.

Photoprism itself recommends PhotoSync.

I don't see a problem in using multiple different products to do the job for me.

I've been using it, and once it gets a stable release it looks like it'll be awesome, but right now it's pretty buggy. The new immich-proxy docker image doesn't work, so you have to use 1.45, and I've been having very odd issues with immich-postgres (it changes the permissions of the pg_data folder to 700 and owner to systemd_coredump... Not good.)

That's awesome! Thanks for sharing. I had a go at all the contenders a while ago when Google Photos changed their storage policy and did not see that one.

I see a sharing menu in one of their screenshots. Considering that it's self-hosted, how does sharing work in that system?

You can create multiple users on your server and share your albums or individual assets with them. You can also create public sharing links that anyone can access, just like Google photos. You'll of course need to make the server accessible to them in some way.

My server is hosted at home in a Raspberry Pi and an SSD for storage. I have a public domain name and it is forwarded to my home network through CloudFlare. Might be a little risky security-wise, but I want to eventually make this instance usable for my parents.

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