Self-hosted photo and video backups directly from your mobile phone
github.com
github.com
this resonates with me.
what solution are you using?
By the way, how do you share files between Nextcloud and Photoprism? It's my biggest problem with NC, it's hard to share files with other apps.
One of my machine is always on and is backuped to the cloud everyday. Effectively making a backup of all my devices at once.
Better yet, since syncthing can also save staggered copies of modified files, a rm -rf * will be synced but the backup machine will still have copy from about 10s ago. This saved me a few times.
Once I realized that I had deleted a file a few months later. And I found it into the syncthing backup, itself within the cloud backup.
Very freeing.
I want an easier way to edit the comments on photos (as embedded metadata) that I haven't found yet. Any image browser where I can hit a convenient hotkey, type "Summer 2023 at the river with cousins X and Y" and move on would be great. If anyone has a suggestion I'm listening keenly! If this is built in to something on MacOS or a linux default desktop (like KDE or something I'm less familiar with), or is a small paid non-subscription app, I would buy it.
Sadly I've not found a self-hosted like-for-like replacement. My photos now move from my phone to a folder that's backed up to s3 via Restic [2].
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2020/02/04/googl...
[2]: https://restic.net/
With AWSPics, sync your photos (just a simple directory tree on your local device) to S3 (I just do it manually from time to time from my desktop, but no doubt it can be done automatically at regular intervals, and/or it can be done directly from a phone), then Lambda functions generate thumbnails and browsable galleries (as static HTML), then you can view it all via CloudFront (password-protected using Origin Access Identity).
AWSPics isn't really being actively maintained these days. But it still works fine for me. The setup is cheap, you basically just pay for the S3 storage (currently costing me a bit under $1/month - and I guess you could use a cheaper S3-compatible alternative like Backblaze and reduce your costs further). No server to set up or maintain. Durable backup built-in. Fast reliable CDN built-in.
When I take a picture with my phone, it automatically gets backed up to iCloud, Google Photos, OneDrive, and Amazon Photos (free with prime).
When I had a personal computer, photos would sync to my computer and get backed up to BackBlaze also.
If you delete a photo on your phone, does it automatically get deleted from all those services in near-realtime?
Do you have an archive solution in place (distinct from your lack of a backup solution)?
I have 2TB on iCloud, 2TB on Google Drive, unlimited back up of photos on Amazon Drive and 1TB on OneDrive. When my OneDrive account gives out of space, I’ll just use one of the other 6 accounts that come with an Office 365 subscription.
I guess for an archive solution, I would use my personal AWS account that’s only used to store my videos that fell off the back of a truck once I took my Plex server off line.
I have 2TB of videos stored in AWS S3 Deep Glacier archive. I’m charged like $2 a month for it.
And on the Mac Apple engineers have made sure the photos are not synced in a simple easy folder hierarchy that can be backed up elsewhere.
So you have no backup.
Works pretty well, although I wasn't seeking it out or researching other options
Everything else is in Immich
Pictures and videos I take get backed up to Google Photos
Once a year I do a Google Takeout and import into Immich
This way I get the best of both worlds
I'm unclear if Syncthing inherently encrypts transfers, but layering it within Tailscale would add that. No?
> All device to device traffic is protected by TLS. To prevent uninvited devices from joining a cluster, the certificate fingerprint of each device is compared to a preset list of acceptable devices at connection establishment.
So yeah, transport is encrypted. I do believe they need to put that fact front and center, though. It took me a few minutes to find out. (Thanks for making me find out, though! I use Syncthing heavily and it never occurred to me to even question this.)
I can rest easy :)
Didn't use the "rolling trashbin" feature yet but need to look into that
Do remember that as you delete photos on your phone to save space, it will delete them on the PC. You would need the PC side to move the photos to a different directory (a cronjob would do).
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fe-file-explorer-pro/id4994701...
On Mac (I am aware you have said Windows) So if I were you I’d just dump app the photos locally in normal folder hierarchies (yes drag and drop; not going hunting in Library folder) and then backup wherever you want them. Here’s something https://support.apple.com/en-in/HT205323. Googled it. Absolutely no idea whether it works or how.
Then put something like Dropbox on the job on iOS and it’ll keep uploading your pics and videos which will show up inside one folder on your Windows as well.
My point is — you can’t rely on iCloud after you setup your backup up sync strategy. So get all your data at one point then start your parallel backup/sync setup (and maybe leave iCloud on as well if price is not a concern).
- Go to https://privacy.apple.com - Choose "Request a copy of your data" - Select iCloud Photos
After a few days you'll receive a download link to the full iCloud Photos library. Perhaps only available in EU (it's a GDPR-mandated feature).
I consider myself to be technological advanced, but other than niche photographer, i wonder if 99.99 % of population would ever go through the effort of setting such a service ?
The added benefit of integrating federated social media is that if you want to share a file with your friends, there's zero load time because the file is already backed up on their Box, or it's striped across multiple Boxes and downloads quickly.
It would have to be dirt cheap though, like a Chromecast.
Or the internet cube (https://internetcu.be/) ?
I use synology myself, don't have experience with qnap but I think it will be pretty similar. plug the box, activate the service, download the phone app and your photos are automatically synced and browsable from the device. You can add other services but the basic functionality is there.
If this app can do background sync of the camera roll directly from iOS to an Android device in one step I may switch to it and stop using both Mobius Sync and Photosync.
While I'm sure this is probably true, the number of features Apple is depriving us from due to alleged "security reasons" is baffling.
It's a general excuse among firms that want to keep their monopoly and walled garden (OpenAI does the same).
Having a separate API for photo access is annoying while developing this use case, but it's appropriate for a couple different reasons: for one, if apps could access the raw files, that could reveal metadata like location. For another, filesystem access wouldn't properly handle cloud-synced photo libraries.
Perhaps photos on iOS are persisted into some sqlite-style database on the device rather than as individual files...
The Dropbox iOS app would be a good example here. It acts as a ReplicatedFileProvider so apps on the device can access your Dropbox files, but it also provides an optional config flow where users can ask for their photos to be backed up. Then, the Dropbox app fetches the photos through PhotoKit and writes the .JPEGs or .HEICs to a folder of your choosing into your Dropbox files.
If you don't use the photos app, you can keep them all in the files app and it syncs just fine. Annoying to use since the files app is nowhere near as nice for photo browsing/management.
I appreciate the intent of this project, but it is not a sustainable approach.
If you are taking a couple of pictures a day, you only need to run this service for a couple of minutes per day, the rest is wasted. With Google Photos, as a SaaS, users are sharing computing power and each users are emitting less CO2.
https://engineering.teads.com/sustainability/carbon-footprin...
You can configure your server to sleep (scheduled or use WoL), which will halve (or more) that carbon emission number.
Speaking of which, individual action will never approach the level that corporate action could. Take a look at the practice of gas flaring (2022 estimate of ~357 million tons CO2) which is about ~45kg/person on earth. Changing flaring to capture will have a bigger impact than a minisucle fraction of the population not running a server.
But profits trump everything, so I guess we're stuck shaming individuals instead.
I sincerely didn't post my comment to shame anymore.
Need for computing is growing fast and it is actually not negligible at all. See the link below, data centers emitted 300 MTCo2 in 2020, similar to the number you mentioned.
https://www.iea.org/reports/data-centres-and-data-transmissi...
Wow, I didn't realize there were so many datacenters. My comment about corporate action still stands though - there's no reason why companies running those data centers cannot switch to renewable sources for even a portion of their usage.
I'm no fanboy but I was impressed to see how Apple's office is 100% powered by solar (75% through rooftop, rest through an offsite farm) :
https://www.solar.com/learn/apples-new-campus-country-larges...
According to Renewable Energy World, the campus will run entirely on renewable energy. It will generate 17 megawatts (MW) of solar on rooftops and also be supplemented by 4 megawatts of Bloom Energy fuel cells. They’re hoping that this onsite generation will cover around 75% of power requirements during working hours. The remaining energy needed will be supplied by a 130-megawatt off-site solar farm in Monterey County.The attitude of "here's a simple step that will cut down your individual carbon emissions, and also please pay attention to the primary sources of the problem"? Because that attitude doesn't seem defeatist or nihilistic at all? I don't think the "profits trump everything" comment was an endorsement of that philosophy.
If I misunderstood, and you were talking about the people hiding behind the companies and industries who are destroying the environment so that they can enrich themselves at everyone's expense then I'd guess that those folks are entirely self-aware and simply don't care that they act out of malice.
It seems like they're willing to hurt anyone and destroy anything if it might grant them a little more money. I wish people would start seeing them for the threat that they are, and spent a lot more of their time thinking about what should be done about those kinds of psychopaths instead of spinning their wheels worrying about how long their computer stays awake.
inaction is bad, but wasted and misdirected action can be every bit as harmful. Focusing on the people who are consistently doing the most harm in the shortest amount of time is only logical unless people have become too defeatist to believe that anything can be done to stop the abuses of industry.
There is a lot of money trying to nerf the world and reduce the population.
How did you get to 150kg of CO2 per user? I'm going to assume you mean each person has one instance rather than sharing an instance like a family would. So thats 375Kwh per year, which works out as drawing 42W. That seems rather high to me.
I'm hoping to try and run this on my Pi4 which idles at under 1W. You could run on a Macbook M1 which only under heavy load conumes 42W, but I doubt this is going to need consistent heavy load: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
For example, I host between 5-10 minecraft servers for my kids, but they sleep while the kids aren't playing on them and only spool up when a link is requested.
A properly configured Linux box would barely need a trickle of energy when nothing is demanding its resources, so I'd guess that the estimates are likely a bit on the high side.
The link I shared has the details of the calculation. The calculation assumes 50% CPU load which is most likely too high for this use case.
I'm not too comfortable pointing to the cloud providers for "efficiency", but you gotta go somewhere. I get that.
Personally I'm more a fan of building more efficient software (green software?). Using 6GB @ 4 cores to handle some media is a bit much IMO..
The CO2 we exhale does not contribute to climate change because it comes from plants (and indirectly animals) that captures it back.
If you burn coal to produce electricity, it releases CO2 in the atmosphere and it will take a long time to sequester that CO2 back into fossil fuel.
Self-hosting anything isn't sustainable. Even your modem or router isn't sustainable. But having additional backups and privacy is worth something for me. However since I'm in Europe, electricity prices here are through the roof and I try to minimize power where possible. I self host Immich on my Intel Celeron J1800 NAS that uses 19.1Wh on average. I cannot run any ML stuff that it comes with though. But for me the carbon intensity should be about 250 gCO₂eq/kWh [1]. So running my NAS produces about 42 Kg of CO₂ per year for 2 users [2]. Including 10 or so additional applications besides Immich. That sounds pretty reasonable to me.
1. https://www.eea.europa.eu/ims/greenhouse-gas-emission-intens...
2. ((0,0191 * 250 * 365,25 * 24) / 1000)
I am curious though, how did you come to 1.75kg per user? I calculated 20.9kg / user / year.
250/1000/1000 kgCO₂eq/Wh x 19.1 Wh x 8760 hours in a year / 2 users = 20.9 kg / user / year
'Valuable' is pretty subjective though. Most of the services are for entertainment purposes. But I also host quite a few useful things such as Bitwarden and CouchDB for Obsidian Sync.
> I calculated 20.9kg / user / year.
You are right. I forgot the 24 hours in my calculation:
(0,0191 * 250 * 365,25 * 24) / 1000
And second, letting Google or Apple manage this doesn't mean it doesn't use energy. They're offsetting or generating? So am I.
When Google manages your pictures, they don't have idle servers for each users. This is the main reason their service is more sustainable.
It has object and face detection. Metadata indexing / searching and multi user support.
The only computationally expensive thing here is face matching. Photoprism recommends two cores and 3G RAM and claims to be able to run on a NAS.
Kg of CO2 is a unit of fearmongering. And if you believe it's not, then the problem is why people are allowed to buy electricity so cheaply, not a photo-sync service.
By the way, a cow produces 120Kg of methane a year.
Thank goodness we're eating so many of them to help reduce their population.
/s
My "backup routine" consists of storing photos in iCloud, which is then syncronized "real time" to a local Mac Mini.
From the Mac Mini i then run scheduled backups to a local external harddrive, as well as a local Raspberry Pi running Minio, and nightly to OneDrive.
The external harddrive backup uses Timemachine, the raspberry pi backup uses Kopia, and OneDrive is done with Arq.
Furthermore, i make yearly archive discs. Identical copies on M-disc Blu-Ray media, stored in geographically different locations. Each disc contains the photos that have changed in the previous 12 months, and no encryption/archiving is used.
Alongside the M-disc media i keep a couple of external harddrives that contains the entire photo library. These are checked (with badblocks, non-destructive surface scan) yearly, updated and rotated when storing the new M-disc media.
The photos also likely have EXIF GPS data and timestamps, so it's also a track log of location history.
I'm aware of that, though it's no different from any other US based cloud provider. I am however a citizen of the EU, so there's the EU/US safe harbor (or Schrems II) agreement in place.
In the end it all comes down to trust vs convenience. I trust Apple more than Amazon or Google, and about as much as Microsoft. Apple keeps my data on EU soil, and is a lot more convenient on Apple platforms. Microsoft sends all OneDrive data to the US.
I do however use Advanced Data Protection for iCloud, which e2e encrypts photos and others. All backups, including local ones, are source encrypted.
These days it's all digital photos, and i think most people agree that some kind of backup is needed. If you primarily use a cloud service, there is probably little risk that your data suddenly vanishes (though it has happened), but instead you're faced with the danger of losing access to that account, meaning your stuff might still exist, you just no longer have access to it.
My "normal" backup routing is simply "iCloud -> Mac Mini -> external harddrive + OneDrive", and the Raspberry Pi and Kopia is a (long running) test to eventually replace time machine.
As for the M-disc archive, it's a convenient and low cost way of creating resilient backups of my photos that doesn't require me to print everything. The archive will survive a lot more hardship than your average digital media, and does not require somewhat frequent usage to retain information. Harddrives lose their charge after 5-7 years of sitting unused, SSDs in as little as 2 years. Blu-Ray media will retain information for decades, and (according to the sales brochure) M-disc will retain information for a millenium, which i assume is about 900+ years longer than i need it to.
In theory, i could simply ditch the remote backup and rely on the M-disc media, but that's where convenience comes into play.
There are two major threats to my photo library. One is loss of the cloud data and/or loss of access to it (and/or malware, natural disasters, etc), which is why i keep data locally as well. The other is loss of data locally, anything from a failed piece of equipment to a house fire.
The reason why i make a local backup of the synchronized cloud data is in case malware decides to encrypt/delete all my photos, in which case iCloud will happily synchronize all the changes to all devices, effectively deleting all good copies.
So with a local backup of the data i've mitigated the first threat, loss of cloud data and/or access to it, but i'm still left with the threat of losing data at home, which is why i also backup to a different cloud provider, which again comes with a threat of losing access, and this is where the Blu-Ray archive comes in.
Because burning Blu-Ray discs is time consuming, i rely on my "day to day" 3-2-1 backup to keep data safe, but ultimately the Blu-Ray discs safeguards against loss of cloud data and loss of local data (identical copies stored in different locations), so they're my last ditch defense of disaster recovery.
Another option one could consider is FolderSync[1]. It has a number of cloud back-ends it can interface with, but I use it to periodically SFTP to my home server to backup several areas in my phone, including photos, camera and app backups.
Two niceties for me it has:
* Two-way sync. I'll often clean up my camera roll on my PC, and that syncs back to the phone.
* Only attempts to connect to me home server if it is on my home wi-fi.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dk.tacit.andro...
I don't have a good situation figured out for browsing unsorted uploaded photos, and I find that this is fine for my usage. I put a curated set of personal albums on a password protected personal site for friends and family. I enjoy the role of family chronicler.
My NAS is backed up via daily snapshot to a remote location.
YMMV!
> Expect bugs and breaking changes.
I get it's the pretty normal to go through fixing bugs, but for a backup solution the core of it should be stable or I would not use it
Just a few weeks ago, facial recognition was added and that was it for me. I finally made the switch from Google Photos and iCloud to immich. It's your self-hosted google photos alternative, with image recognition, a map, sharing folders publicly, or with other users on your server.
Some parts will be buggy though, like face detection, or memories. But the whole "backup & sync" part is very reliable, I've never had any issues.
From what I can tell, Immich, Ente, and PhotoPrism are the best of the batch when it comes to open source photo storage and management. They are all good, but it depends on what you’re looking for.
Personally, I want: E2E encryption, on-device face recognition, and the ability to self-host as well as a paid option for people who don’t want to manage their own server. The existing options each hit about 90% of that, but it’s a different 90% for each one.
Frankly, I have had issues with Google Photos already. For me, it simply stopped recognizing faces since last October. I tried disabling and then enabling face recognition multiple times, but to no avail. It starts recognition from scratch, but only for photos before October. Writing to the support didn't help (although I didn't expect it to anyway), so alternatives like this one are becoming more and more tempting.
I'm already self-hosting a bunch of things, but facial recognition (when it was working) was much better in Google Photos and a major reason why I'm paying for additional storage.
It’s explicitly saying it’s not a backup solution.
Immich on the other hand expressly tries to be a Google Photos replacement, and while I initially thought that was an audacious goal for a fresh open source project to have, I have been pleasantly surprised by how feature-rich it has become in a short amount of time.
I know the developer makes it very clear that it's not stable yet, so I'm making sure I back up everything from my server at regular intervals. But I've found it to be more and more stable with new releases, so hopefully a first stable release is not far away.
I've also been questing for a Google Photos replacement, and right now Nextcloud functions admirably for auto-sync but like garbage for anything past that like viewing albums afterwards. I've had an instance of Photoprism up for a while and was debating bringing it into "production" on my homelab.
I've spent too much time setting up fun docker instances on it instead
I guess it needs a better description, IMO a project with several big components (web, mobile, backend) sells itself short being named just "backup solution".
Looks relatively straightforward to get running, pretty much inline with what I had to do in order to get PhotoPrism running in the first place. Only thing I couldn't see anything about was hardware acceleration, do leverage any of the Intel instructions (VAAPI) for transcoding? That's a paid feature on PhotoPrism and something that's sorely needed. CPU bound transcoding is terrible!
Think I'll put this on the TODO list for the weekend!
[1]https://www.photoprism.app/ [2]https://www.photosync-app.com/home
Getting rid of all of the Google dependencies in my life is... Ugly. I would really like to still trust Google. I just can't anymore.
I agree though. It's a shame how iOS is completely crippling background apps.
I'm hoping for an alternative for Google Photos and I'm paying for ente.io. It works fine on Android, but background sync doesn't work on iOS. So for me personally it is not ready to replace Google Photos. If it can't be set and forget for non-technical family members it's not going to cut it.
Highly recommend that app
It's so simple but also extensive. AND the "pro" version (what ever IAP they have) supports Apple Family Sharing so anyone in the family can use it.
It would be nice to be able to tell it to stay away from Download.
I really love the idea of this project but I feel like it is grossly over engineered.
On the other hand, I always think its awesome to see self hosted solutions! It helps to create competition.
If you've never self hosted anything there is indeed a large initial time and money investment. However, going through it once it pays itself off in the long run and adding additional services or maintaining existing ones becomes trivial.
Actually owning your data and having full control over it without worrying who it might be shared with or how it might be used is absolutely worth the hassle for some people.
Will also backup offsite and take a manual snapshot each year for all my pics. Unlikely that I will backup the Plex-style media.
I am just as afraid of Google shutting off my account as I am about losing my own data.
I’ve been thinking about creating a service to back files up for 100+ years. I think s3 will be around that long, but the offering would need to survive the saas shutdown with a way to continue paying the bills. Could have an escrow fund to incentivize devs to maintain cloud storage integrations, with some sort of a voting mechanism for subscribers (crypto tokens for corp governance?)
Just putting a few half baked thoughts into the ether in case you find it interesting.
Unless you have kids. [If you have kids Google is a no-go](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil...). Since becoming a dad I've finally started to untangle myself from Google. Only thing left is my android phone - seriously considering an alternative e.g. apple (but I wouldn't store pictures with them either)
I was expecting this to be Hacker News hyperbole but god that is TERRIFYING. Apple's CSAM plans were using a database of known images and got enough backlash, but Google trying to use AI to detect abuse? What a HORRIBLE idea.
According to this support article, you can store original quality. Assuming that is what you meant by "lossless".
Demo instances need to have really short reset periods - minutes or so, or alternatively disable password changes.
The thing that stood out to me about immich was how when I first saw a show-off post on /r/selfhosted, it included a video showing how instant the thumbnails loaded as well as some background on how they were focusing on optimizing the scrolling performance and ensuring blurred thumbnails would be available asap when scrolling. I was impressed at how it stacked up to the experience of using google photos.
Auto share photos of a certain face to an album that is shared with a group. Group is notified when new photos are added.
This is CLUTCH for new parents.
That being said, this is incredible and I’m definitely moving over the first chance I get.
Please add a description heading on top too. I didn't understand what you mean by self hosting on phone. Does it all run on your phone making your phone the main backup server? Or do you mean there is an app which you run and connect to a self hosted backup server?
At https://pikapods.com, we revenue share with the author (Alex) and provide hosting for less technical users. So hoping to see it grow and improve further.
1) Anyone try Backblaze for photo backups? Is it worth trying?
2) Why is immich photo and video only?
3) Why docker? I miss the days of just files and scripts on any host.
To your third point, I scratched my head and looked suspiciously at Docker from a distance for years, but since I've started playing with it, I absolutely love it and would not go back. Every dependency that you need is wrapped up in a single image, so installing the application is as simple as pulling the image and booting up a container from it; no worries about conflicts with other services, broken or conflicting dependencies, or breaking something later on when you make other changes. Don't like the exact installation and want to make your own? Make or modify a dockerfile, and build a new image. Want to upgrade? Just destroy the container and create a new one with the updated version - all your data, config files, etc. are (or should be!) in separate volumes from the container itself so you lose nothing, and in fact you can easily experiment with different releases, or rollback if something goes wrong. For myself, I treat all my containers as ephemeral and always recreate them whenever I restart them - it costs nothing and I know that the system is easily reproducible. Speaking of volumes, backups are a breeze - all my Docker volumes are just subdirectories of /docker/volumes so all I have to do is back that up every night and I've got a complete copy that I can instantly restore (or clone!). It really is incredibly convenient.
Personally I'm looking forward to when this is included in Nix so I get a ephemeral/reproducible install that doesn't add a second copy of both postgres and ngingx.
2) It's a replacement for google photos.
3) Ease of use and flexibility, you can deploy a docker compose file easily on any host or distro without needing to deal with dependencies or OS specific glitches.
Yes, happy customer for many years. Restored ~2GB of photos when a MacBook Pro motherboard completely died about 18 months ago.
Ahh yes, the ol. piping code from the internet into a root shell
What I'm still desperately looking for is proper self-hosted full-phone backups for Android phones.
My wife and I each have a separate Apple Photos library. I'd love it if we could have a combined backup solution.
Could we keep using Photos and back up to this, or would it be better to ditch Photos and just switch over?
- 4 cores/6GB RAM is $40/mo on DigitalOcean, and that's with only 160GB storage. Lowest AWS S3 tier is $0.023/GB, so assuming 1-2TB of photos that's $30-40 for additional storage.
- The non-named company's 2TB subscription is $100/mo, translating to savings of only ~$20.
- Building a server would be probably ~$250, electricity costs per month could vary greatly but maybe $30-50?. So would pay off after ~3 years.
Another thing to keep in mind is that - the server you get for $250 would also allow you to deploy many other apps (I have a similar spec, and deploy ~20 apps). So, net-net if the setup brings you happiness and ROI (in any form at all), it is worth investing!
I can buy a 4TB HDD for ~$80. Assuming I need more storage, this saves money.
The project is under very active development. Expect bugs and changes. Do not use it as the only way to store your photos and videos!
I've been looking at immich and photoprism; how do the two compare, what are the advantages of immich over photoprism, and vice versa?
I'm using Samsung Galaxy phone, photos auto sync to nextcloud... but I DO NOT WANT EVERY SINGLE PHOTO TO BE SYNCED. I'd rather tap "favorite" that would somehow put that photo in an album/path that gets synced/backed-up.
Does anyone have a solution? That is, I want a single tap on photo that I consider worth backing up. Or it can work other way around - single tap to exclude from sync.
But I do not want every photo land there. Pics that I need to take temporary when I just take a photo of something to lookup one time (wiring colors before disconnecting, a photo I want to show single time for my wife etc.)
Ideally there would be app that would take whatever is marked as favorite (dunno, maybe metadata stores that info) and move those pics.
OR someone can just recommend some photo app which with a single click moves photo to folder X :)
EDIT: after a quick assessment in the doc pages/features, this seems to... blow Photoprism out of the water?
Works a treat and requires zero intervention, although is based on a) MS software and b) deprecated Google software, so may not work forever.
So you can search for "fish" for example and it will show photos of fish.
And apparently it has facial recognition, so you can find photos of a specific person by name.
These are killer features of Google photos for me, so it is exciting to see them in a self hosted, open source offering.
There is a demo linked on the GitHub page that I checked out:
Immich also does use CLIP to cluster similar faces and so on. Not only that, geotagging, camera details etc.
However I have held off on moving to it because it wants to assume control of all media and store them again. So I would be using up 2x the space required.
I mean I guess sending emails is relatively easy, but doing that for every photo you want to keep — for 20 years — sounds like a ton of manual effort.
I have always failed to see the appeal of a cloud solution.
Whenever I arrive at home, I immediately move all the new photos from my mobile phone to my computer. This costs nothing, except a few seconds of my time and it is perfectly secure.
I prefer to not keep any personal information on a mobile phone, except the mandatory list of contacts.
when I'm on the same LAN as my backup destination and on a 802.11ac 2x2 80 MHz channel AP, it's shockingly fast, whatever is the max real world speed of my wireless connection, somewhere around 40-50MB per second to do the sync.
I know this sentence is true for prompt engineering, but please help me with my language barrier. Is the meaning of "engineering" in this context more akin to "hammering out"? Does English have a specific ambiguity here? In my language "to engineer" means a specific technical activity with strong scientific roots, and a regulated profession. You cannot legally call yourself an engineer unless you jave a specific university degree and have a specific certification.
Nothing of what is described in this sentence would ever have anything to do with "engineering".
- Upload via the webUI
- Import a folder of photos on the host (copies photos to the Immich directory)
- Add a folder of photos on the host (leaves photos in place)
You shook not have only one backup ever. But this project says this in the context of not being production ready. So at least I won’t play with it with my personal photos and videos.
For example, here is an issue where a raspberry pi 4 is used. https://github.com/immich-app/immich/issues/611
Picasa had face recognition, basic editing, and a bunch of sorting features and ran on computers that had something like 1/50th the CPU performance.
Meanwhile modern replacements like DigiKam, Lightroom, ON1, and so on are incredibly bloated with very slow UI response even on a very powerful desktop PC.
Although Immich does at least work well, the webUI is extremely fast and loads images instantly.