I’m trying to find a way to have my iPhone’s photos be automatically (or even manually) backed up/synced with my home server.
I heard about photo prism here and got it up and running, however I could not find a free app that lets you sync. Photo sync is their main recommendation and it puts high quality photo backup behind premium.
Is there any solution that lets you backup your photos through home wifi?
Immich has completely replaced Google Photos for me, love it!
My only bugbear is that it is updated very frequently (what a nice problem to have!) which in my case requires a manual once-over of my docker-compose file every time in case there are breaking changes.
As a developer myself I’m not sure if I would trust any application to safely handle a configuration that has become invalid due to a breaking change, especially not an app that is still under active development! Better safe than sorry.
It’s docker compose changes (at least the ones in the last 2 years have been), so it’s not really config related with a worry about breaking stuff from that.
But also multiple backups are in place anyways, so worst case I restore from that.
Damn. I think a few updates have happened on the App but not seen an issue yet. Guess I’ll update the docker image when an app update does break it - family don’t use it often and I don’t want to manage their phone updating the app.
Bit its deprecated now because Google pissed off the only developer. I mean forget photos, I need a whole phone file system backup tool that is self hosted. I don’t want any of my stuff to end up in Google servers. I take lots of research notes and photos. WTF. That shit should be illegal.
The android app developed by the syncthing dev is deprecated, the fork is still fine. While the fork’s dev has no plans to publish to google play, there’s presently no reason to think they will discontinue supporting the fork.
Immich has a setting that does automatic photo backup over WiFi, I use the android app as a Google photos replacement. You can choose however many folders on your phone as you want (I just do camera roll) and enable only backup over WiFi and it backs up all the photos in original quality. I self-host the server on my Synology with a reverse proxy (can’t forward ports at my current place due to cgnat) so I can access it from anywhere.
I believe the app is cross platform so the iPhone version should be identical to the android one.
I’ve been using it for a couple of years though. I have not really had any problems with auto-upload from my android phone.
So not sure if that “not even alpha stage” comment is correct. I don’t know the state of it on iOS though.
Automatic photo upload works good, but it’s the album creation (and sharing with other users) that severely lacks in features. 3rd party modules like memories are also better
But for official photos, last time i checked it 3 months ago, you could add photos to an album only at the moment of creation, and not add later
Can confirm that nextcloud photo back is for the most part rock solid, they have had some issues when Android changes something and that mess up the process.
But I took have been running it for years, of your nextcloud install is ropey then your photo sync will be.
Nextcloud has so many bugs when you store a lot of files, and photos on a phone accumulate to a big number. Both their Android app and server doesn’t deal with a few years’ worth of photos.
I have years worth of photos backed up from my phone (android) on Nextcloud, it’s working pretty well… but it matters how you set up the auto upload and a few other things, and I’mnot claiming it’s without issues.
For example, I set it to move files into Nextcloud’s folder after uploading, so they appear as locally synced, and can be deleted to free up space if needed (maybe even automatically, not sure). Also, I set it to also upload existing files, because since they get moved, anything that’s still there clearly needs to be uploaded.
There are a few issues viewing media from the app, sometimes, but I use the Memories app :)
I’ve been meaning to try immich, looks pretty good, but I use Nextcloud for much more than just photos, so I’d have to keep both and have them sync somehow, and I’m not sure how to do that.
Yea only times I’ve had issues is if I run out of space allocated to the container that runs it.
I currently have 16GB of phone uploads and 540G overall, it works fine
And you don’t have your notification bar on the phone full of upload errors? Nextcloud doesn’t open 15 seconds on the computer? Can you get to older photos in under an hour, while Nextcloud slowly loads one thumbnail per second?
It is really unbeleviable how there are some people for whom Nextcloud just works, and the rest of us.
I gave up on my personal self-hosted instance a long ago, and at work we use commercially hosted Nextcloud and have to get a new account ~yearly because it slows down like Windows 95 when data accumulates.
Legit have had none of these issues.
I do get a notification once in a while if I modify a picture fast enough, like a quick crop and it’s still uploading. Like snap pic and edit within the same 5 seconds or so.
Basically just a: “there are multiple versions of the same file (which is true), which one do you wanna keep”.
Then again mine is running on a pretty beefy server which might hide issues rooted in performance.
I remember it being hell when I was running it on a RPi.
Yea, it’s not the first time I’ve seen this discussion either.
I don’t wanna seem like I’m not believing you or belittling your experience, I just find it weird that we (we, users, as a whole, not just you and I) have such wildly different experiences with it.
As is, I have a vastly better experience with my own nextcloud than with corporate’s onedrive, with more stuff on mine.
Wish I knew why it’s so inconsistent.
Even though my nextcloud experience is fine, I know plenty of people with the opposite.
And, to offer something positive too: I like Photoprism, it’s very fast, browsing old photos just works with no extra delay, there’s search by date, location, tags, even face detection.
And you don’t have your notification bar on the phone full of upload errors?
I get a bunch of upload errors for photos that I delete or move before nextcloud has a chance to upload them, those are safe to ignore. Not sure which errors you’re getting…
Can you get to older photos in under an hour, while Nextcloud slowly loads one thumbnail per second?
Forget about the plain nextcloud photos app, use the Memories app (incl. the android app).
Not as good as immich, from what I understand, but if you already have nextcloud, or need more than just photos, it works well.
It is really unbeleviable how there are some people for whom Nextcloud just works, and the rest of us.
It’s definitely not perfect, but since I was able to set it up to work well for me, I’m keeping it, at least until I have time to install immich and figure out how to sync the two (and maybe get a more powerful server to use its ML features). I’m currently running it off of a decade old chromebox …
That feature kinda works, but it’s incredibly fragile. It has caused so many annoyances for me over the last year or so that I’m finally done with the thing. Just go with immich instead, less headache.
I’ve been using Ente Photos, and PhotoPrism and I’ve been liking Ente pretty well. Little bit more work to get things setup and going but I’ve been enjoying it for the last few months
What low-effort app do you recommended? I hate messing around with networking stuff, but I’m willing to build a home server, if that means I can finally get away from Google Photos. It must have HEIC support and a “memories” feature (where it automatically creates albums sends me notifications about what it wants to show me).
@Psythik@dogma11 I’m a bit of a broken record on this but #Yunohost is fairly low effort and allows you to get basic Nextcloud and a few other apps running fairly quickly.
@dogma11 I’m hoping to put #Promox on a Dell Optiplex Micro soon. I’m currently running Yunohost on Cloud VM and on a RaspberryPi locally. Looking at configuring backup at the moment and also seeing if I can work out how to do the config for #Zigbee2MQTT so that they can add that as a supported application.
Probably be Ente even if it does take a little bit to configure it and get a web UI and stuff.
PhotoPrism was easy for me to get up and running with Proxmox and the great community scripts to setup a container but having to have photosync is a drawback I don’t care much for.
I believe both have something to like a memories feature
I have all my photos synced to iCloud and have Apple Photos running on my Mac with the option to “always download originals” enabled. Then, I run a daily backup of my Mac’s photo library to my NAS. For this, I’m using CCC at the moment but I’m planning to switch to restic.
It doesn’t matter what software you use, Apple doesn’t allow automatic backups on their phones. Consider buying a different phone that allows you to use it as you see fit.
That is not true, it is completely possible with systems like Nextcloud and Owncloud. I have one set up at home and it’s great.
The phone app auto-uploads your chosen pics directory’s contents to your chosen cloud backup folder on a schedule or any time you want. And it’s free software.
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I use Immich, and I love it.
Immich has completely replaced Google Photos for me, love it!
My only bugbear is that it is updated very frequently (what a nice problem to have!) which in my case requires a manual once-over of my docker-compose file every time in case there are breaking changes.
I go the other way, auto-update and fix the file if it goes down lol
As a developer myself I’m not sure if I would trust any application to safely handle a configuration that has become invalid due to a breaking change, especially not an app that is still under active development! Better safe than sorry.
It’s docker compose changes (at least the ones in the last 2 years have been), so it’s not really config related with a worry about breaking stuff from that.
But also multiple backups are in place anyways, so worst case I restore from that.
Like everyone is saying, Immich.
But keep an eye on updates because it is under active development so breaking changes tend to happen every once in a while.
Does Immich auto update / breaking changes?
The server doesn’t, except if you have watchtower or something similar.
The app auto updates on your phone though, unless turned off.
Damn. I think a few updates have happened on the App but not seen an issue yet. Guess I’ll update the docker image when an app update does break it - family don’t use it often and I don’t want to manage their phone updating the app.
Luckily the app is generally (but not always) backwards compatible. It’ll just nag you to upgrade the server.
On itself it doesn’t auto update, you do get a notification in the app if your server is outdated.
You can setup watchtower or something similar to update it but it is discouraged due to the active development
Only if you auto-update the docker images on your server.
There have been a few breaking chances, but it just takes a minute to tweak the compose file and it’s up and running again.
Apparently docker images must be manually updated, so currently I don’t. Thanks for the info.
I use syncthing to keep all my documents and pictures synced between my devices.
Yeah this.
I don’t keep all my photos in sync though. Only the last few months.
I’m using photoprism to browse photos on my server but I’ve been meaning to look at other options because it’s not that great IMO.
I swapped out photoprism for immich and I’m much happier.
Bit its deprecated now because Google pissed off the only developer. I mean forget photos, I need a whole phone file system backup tool that is self hosted. I don’t want any of my stuff to end up in Google servers. I take lots of research notes and photos. WTF. That shit should be illegal.
The android app developed by the syncthing dev is deprecated, the fork is still fine. While the fork’s dev has no plans to publish to google play, there’s presently no reason to think they will discontinue supporting the fork.
Immich has a setting that does automatic photo backup over WiFi, I use the android app as a Google photos replacement. You can choose however many folders on your phone as you want (I just do camera roll) and enable only backup over WiFi and it backs up all the photos in original quality. I self-host the server on my Synology with a reverse proxy (can’t forward ports at my current place due to cgnat) so I can access it from anywhere.
I believe the app is cross platform so the iPhone version should be identical to the android one.
I think right now it is a throwdown between:
Nextcloud photos is in the “proof of concept” stage, not even alpha.
I’ve been using it for a couple of years though. I have not really had any problems with auto-upload from my android phone. So not sure if that “not even alpha stage” comment is correct. I don’t know the state of it on iOS though.
Automatic photo upload works good, but it’s the album creation (and sharing with other users) that severely lacks in features. 3rd party modules like memories are also better
But for official photos, last time i checked it 3 months ago, you could add photos to an album only at the moment of creation, and not add later
You can easily add photos to an album from the web interface. But still not from the Nextcloud android client.
Can confirm that nextcloud photo back is for the most part rock solid, they have had some issues when Android changes something and that mess up the process.
But I took have been running it for years, of your nextcloud install is ropey then your photo sync will be.
Nextcloud. Works super well.
Immich. Come for the photo backup, stay for everything else because it’s awesome.
Nextcloud’s instant upload feature?
Whenever I take a picture or screenshot it’s uploaded there.
Nextcloud might be overkill if that’s the only feature you need. I’ve never used the more involved stuff like chat or document editing, just sync.
Nextcloud has so many bugs when you store a lot of files, and photos on a phone accumulate to a big number. Both their Android app and server doesn’t deal with a few years’ worth of photos.
I have years worth of photos backed up from my phone (android) on Nextcloud, it’s working pretty well… but it matters how you set up the auto upload and a few other things, and I’mnot claiming it’s without issues.
For example, I set it to move files into Nextcloud’s folder after uploading, so they appear as locally synced, and can be deleted to free up space if needed (maybe even automatically, not sure). Also, I set it to also upload existing files, because since they get moved, anything that’s still there clearly needs to be uploaded.
There are a few issues viewing media from the app, sometimes, but I use the Memories app :)
I’ve been meaning to try immich, looks pretty good, but I use Nextcloud for much more than just photos, so I’d have to keep both and have them sync somehow, and I’m not sure how to do that.
Yea only times I’ve had issues is if I run out of space allocated to the container that runs it.
I currently have 16GB of phone uploads and 540G overall, it works fine
And you don’t have your notification bar on the phone full of upload errors? Nextcloud doesn’t open 15 seconds on the computer? Can you get to older photos in under an hour, while Nextcloud slowly loads one thumbnail per second?
It is really unbeleviable how there are some people for whom Nextcloud just works, and the rest of us.
I gave up on my personal self-hosted instance a long ago, and at work we use commercially hosted Nextcloud and have to get a new account ~yearly because it slows down like Windows 95 when data accumulates.
Legit have had none of these issues.
I do get a notification once in a while if I modify a picture fast enough, like a quick crop and it’s still uploading. Like snap pic and edit within the same 5 seconds or so.
Basically just a: “there are multiple versions of the same file (which is true), which one do you wanna keep”.
Then again mine is running on a pretty beefy server which might hide issues rooted in performance.
I remember it being hell when I was running it on a RPi.
I had it on a beefy server too. Glad that it works for you, every nextcloud thread on social media has a discussion like ours.
Yea, it’s not the first time I’ve seen this discussion either.
I don’t wanna seem like I’m not believing you or belittling your experience, I just find it weird that we (we, users, as a whole, not just you and I) have such wildly different experiences with it.
As is, I have a vastly better experience with my own nextcloud than with corporate’s onedrive, with more stuff on mine.
Wish I knew why it’s so inconsistent.
Even though my nextcloud experience is fine, I know plenty of people with the opposite.
And, to offer something positive too: I like Photoprism, it’s very fast, browsing old photos just works with no extra delay, there’s search by date, location, tags, even face detection.
I get a bunch of upload errors for photos that I delete or move before nextcloud has a chance to upload them, those are safe to ignore. Not sure which errors you’re getting…
Forget about the plain nextcloud photos app, use the Memories app (incl. the android app).
Not as good as immich, from what I understand, but if you already have nextcloud, or need more than just photos, it works well.
It’s definitely not perfect, but since I was able to set it up to work well for me, I’m keeping it, at least until I have time to install immich and figure out how to sync the two (and maybe get a more powerful server to use its ML features). I’m currently running it off of a decade old chromebox …
That feature kinda works, but it’s incredibly fragile. It has caused so many annoyances for me over the last year or so that I’m finally done with the thing. Just go with immich instead, less headache.
You can use the Nextcloud app with the much simpler KaraDAV backend. Works fine for photo backups.
https://immich.app/
This is amazing, exactly what I was looking for!
Absolutely phenomenal. Great app, hosting, and development community.
It’s a good reason to start self hosting.
This. Its excellent. Cross platform. AI search. Location tagging. Everythibg u want.
Sounds overkill just for backing up files.
Its more of a complete Google Photos replacement than a basic backup/syncing system
I’ve been using folder sync pro for ages and ages https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dk.tacit.android.foldersync.full
It basically syncs a folder from your phone to a folder on your home servers share.
I think it was paid… But it’s been years so I couldn’t tell you.
It’s currently $3.99 in the Play Store for me, with a crossed-out list price of $6.49. Not a bad deal.
Yeah I’ve definitely gotten that out of it.
It backs up my entire phone to my server.
I’ve been using Ente Photos, and PhotoPrism and I’ve been liking Ente pretty well. Little bit more work to get things setup and going but I’ve been enjoying it for the last few months
What low-effort app do you recommended? I hate messing around with networking stuff, but I’m willing to build a home server, if that means I can finally get away from Google Photos. It must have HEIC support and a “memories” feature (where it automatically creates albums sends me notifications about what it wants to show me).
@Psythik @dogma11 I’m a bit of a broken record on this but #Yunohost is fairly low effort and allows you to get basic Nextcloud and a few other apps running fairly quickly.
Yunohost seems pretty good. I’ve only had experience with CasaOS as a self hosting framework.
I run all my stuff in Proxmox
@dogma11 I’m hoping to put #Promox on a Dell Optiplex Micro soon. I’m currently running Yunohost on Cloud VM and on a RaspberryPi locally. Looking at configuring backup at the moment and also seeing if I can work out how to do the config for #Zigbee2MQTT so that they can add that as a supported application.
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Probably be Ente even if it does take a little bit to configure it and get a web UI and stuff. PhotoPrism was easy for me to get up and running with Proxmox and the great community scripts to setup a container but having to have photosync is a drawback I don’t care much for.
I believe both have something to like a memories feature
I have all my photos synced to iCloud and have Apple Photos running on my Mac with the option to “always download originals” enabled. Then, I run a daily backup of my Mac’s photo library to my NAS. For this, I’m using CCC at the moment but I’m planning to switch to restic.
It doesn’t matter what software you use, Apple doesn’t allow automatic backups on their phones. Consider buying a different phone that allows you to use it as you see fit.
Photo sync claims it does and as I mentioned in the post, I’m okay with needing to trigger it myself via its own app.
You shouldn’t be okay with that.
Do you need a hug?
Uhhh I’ll take one if you’re giving them 😃
That is not true, it is completely possible with systems like Nextcloud and Owncloud. I have one set up at home and it’s great.
The phone app auto-uploads your chosen pics directory’s contents to your chosen cloud backup folder on a schedule or any time you want. And it’s free software.
Does it automatically delete pictures when you’re out of space ?
No, and I wouldn’t want it to. I have plenty of space on my server anyway.
No not on the server, on the phone. You know how it fills up with photos?