It's not just about third-party storage - I have a picture of my great-grandmother and her parents from 1898 when she was 3 in my photo album. It survived several wars, regimes, and revolutions. No current digital tech in general can provide this kind of longevity, you have to actively watch the media yourself and transfer it when it's about to expire. (which I also do for the rest, of course)
Your house burns down, now what?
> I have a picture of my great-grandmother and her parents from 1898 when she was 3 in my photo album. It survived several wars, regimes, and revolutions. No current digital tech in general can provide this kind of longevity
That's because digital storage didn't exist then... Now it's easier and cheaper to store media than ever before
Maybe I'm missing something in your argument, but to me it sounds naive?
Or maybe you're just in a nostalgic mood!
I also remember when I left Facebook and asked for an archive of my photos, I got 800x600 images when I had uploaded much higher resolution ones. Service degradation is actually more common in FAANG because they have a massive moat and rely on the fact that 90% of their customers don't know their 1's from their 0's.
I compared checksums of (recently uploaded)
1) original source images
2) result of clicking "Download" in the Web UI
3) what was contained in my most recent Takeout
And they all match. There might be issues with the API (didn't check), but that API is VERY limited anyway.
It’s only good for backups though. There’s no way to browse/share memories so we reluctantly still also use Amazon photos...
This is just about choosing a cloud storage provider that I can feel reasonably confident will still have my photos backed up on any given day for the foreseeable future.
Far better IMO to not rely on a single provider, especially in the case of backups.
It comes with an adapter for Google Photos, so you can use it to download / backup photos and videos in your library.
Note: there are some limitations to this approach – namely that rclone won't be able to download your original image files, even if you uploaded with 'original' quality. These limitations are documented on the rclone website: https://rclone.org/googlephotos/
I have it run via a cron job and backup files to a local folder.
I also use this to backup my gmail account: https://github.com/jay0lee/got-your-back
I store these on a local OpenSuse box I use as a NAS. It has a local drive, with a 2nd drive that is mounted and synced to weekly. Then the important stuff is rsynced offsite to a cloud server, rsync for pictures and other various "family" stuff. Borg for home drives with more private information.
That internal drive I backup to, runs btrfs. After backup is complete. I take a snapshot and keep a monthly one going back at least a year.
From there RClone encrypts and copies them to AWS Glacier Deep Archive (11 9s, etc). I'll also start coping them to Google Workspace (was GSuite).
This removes a lot of product change risks such as Google APIs not returning the original files, etc. AWS Glacier is secure and cheap unless I have to restore. If I'm doing a full restore it's likely that's the cheapest option so then I don't care.
Glacier Deep Archive works out to about $1/TB/month and because it's paid per GB it removes the risks of a company changing plans or some "unlimited but not really" problem.
One piece of advice, think about your local disaster risks. I'm in an earthquake risk area. I ruled out most off-site backup options that involved moving drives around due to those all being in my same disaster area and costs of bank boxes etc.
Is iCloud better for this?
As Google Photos is my main usecase for being stuck in the Google Ecosystem, is this situation better with the iCloud?
If you delete something from the Adobe cloud, is it deleted from your backups too?
What do you use for sharing albums with friends?
What do you use for displaying photos on a TV?
A takeout request can take "a few weeks", during which you just can't download them.
Google has also had too many cases of banning accounts with no recourse. I'd be scared for it to be my only backup of something so treasured.
I use Apple's iCloud with a 2TB plan as my primary. I back it up with Google One's 2TB family plan where we have a common family photos (wife, and I)and my 11-year old daughter learning to shoot. The Google Photos is more because Apple has no correct implementation of sharing/collaborating between the family members.
- Stingle is costlier than Apple or Google's plan.
- It does not say anywhere that this is open source and I can host it myself, plugged in with a storage such as AWS S3 or Wasabi or any other cloud that I can backup/store etc.
So far, NextCloud[1] seems to be the best bet with PhotoSync[2] keeping a local/cloud backup. I need the ability to share photos with an expansive network of families/relatives on different platforms such as Android, Windows, Mac, Linux.
I haven't found any other services and am beginning to believe I have a weird and different needs than most.
It doesn't, which sucks. I was hoping for the exact same thing. It only says that the client is open source, so you can verify that your photos are actually encrypted.
PhotoStructure is especially applicable if you want a cross-platform solution (mac, windows, linux, docker), and don't want to be tied to a specific NAS or cloud vendor[1].
Every time you open the home page you see something new, as PhotoStructure picks out random "samples" by year, or by camera, or by keyword. It's fun to see photos you haven't seen in a while!
I like to use iCloud primarily, but I'm looking for a solution to sync the collection to take an offline regular versioned backup. So far all the options I've tried kept all photos, including the deleted ones, and duplicate the modified ones.
Unfortunately not open source, but it is what it is.
Ask yourself why would an open-source tool provide "cloud storage"? To bring more customers to the respective cloud provider? It's also not particularly altruistic in a FOSS sense to lock your photos into cloud plans.
Free/Libre Google Photos, basically.
It's basically a software package on the Synology NAS which creates a locally hosted version of Google Photos (including sharing and gallery capability). It comes with Android/iOS apps that can automatically backups all photos directly to your NAS and thus stay in your own ownership.
There is a cost of entrance though - you need to buy the NAS and harddrives... but IMO there's nothing quite like owning your own data.
Sure, but I already have servers and terabytes of storage. Also, I don't want to keep a server/NAS at home. I want it sitting on a big, fat pipe in some DC with professionals maintaining it.
https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#pho...
Best google photos clone I've come across so far.
EDIT: no E2EE or mobile support, it’s web based. It is self hosted with a privacy focus.
If you ever find anything odd, confusing, or buggy, please tell me, I'll try to get it addressed asap.
My wife and I use it exclusively to auto-backup our mobile photos.
With that in mind, I'd say that yes it works, but is it the right tool? Not really.
First, we don't use the web stuff at all, the app isn't great when it comes to choosing what, how and to which folders things should be synced. It is however useful that I can share my auto-upload folder with my wife's account so she can print the photos I take of our baby daughter, she's almost exclusively the subject of our mobile photographs these days.
Finally, you're almost guaranteed to break it every few updates. I've spent several evening over the past couple of years recovering from updates. Much of this is likely down to my lack of knowledge of FreeBSD, but honestly, it shouldn't be breaking in the first place.
I began writing something in something in Golang, that would use microservices to read out exit data, generate thumbnails and provide APIs to give family members custom photo frames we could push photos to. Unfortunately I haven't had the motivation to continue working on it.
I'll keep looking for something else with good Android apps, preferably written in Golang so it's lean and easy to update that'll do the backup/sharing.
[1]: https://ente.io
Styling the app to look like a Google-app is an unusual choice. I've developed a rejection of thing that use this style, mostly since they're always apps actually made by Google.
If you tailor to people trying to move away from google, trying to look like google might not transmit the best impression.
Maintaining a self hosted alternative in parallel requires bandwidth which I currently lack.
Once the product is mature and has sufficient traction, it would be in my best interest to open source the server.
But bundling a photo viewer/gallery just seems like a bit of bloat to me. I'm love to see an app that does syncing and only syncing.
I'm curious because it's pretty easy to find a postal address for any giant company, however what will you gain from it?
What I gain is trust, without it, I have suspicion.
Peergos is an E2EE P2P global filesystem built on top of IPFS, and we have a built in photo/video/audio gallery/player (and other apps too). We don't expose the social graph (who is sharing with who) to the server, and we also obscure things like the number of files, number of directories, size of individual files, even whether something is a directory or file. We are also designed to be resistant to exposure by a quantum computer (mainly we don't rely on asymmetric encryption for privacy, only for sharing, and even for sharing we take measures to protect against a future quantum computer). We also don't rely on DNS or the TLS certificate authorities for security (unless you choose to use the web interface to a public server). We do fine-grained server-less access control using a structure called cryptree [3].
It's P2P so you can mirror your data as many times as you like or just self-host. It's also 100% open source, both client side and server side.
> Perkeep (née Camlistore) is a set of open source formats, protocols, and software for modeling, storing, searching, sharing and synchronizing data in the post-PC era. Data may be files or objects, tweets or 5TB videos, and you can access it via a phone, browser or FUSE filesystem.
Edit Downvoted? I don't understand. Perkeep contains the same functionality as the post, but much more, is much more mature, and is totally open source (not like the posted software, where the important core, the server, is closed source).
There’s a psychological barrier for pre 1.0 releases that must be handled in any serious project.
Anyway, your argument was discussed very recently here: https://github.com/perkeep/perkeep/issues/1307
Perkeep was also a couple of times on HN before, e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18008240
This is an interesting overview/comparison to maybe understand a bit better about the goals: https://perkeep.org/doc/compare
And this: https://github.com/perkeep/perkeep/blob/master/doc/overview....
As for an organizer, nothing has replaced Picasa and it's a shame Google didn't open source it.
1. Minimize footprint. Keep only the photos that matter; this usually ends up being the ones with you or a loved one in the picture. I spent a weekend consolidating and reduced all my photos for the last 20 years down to 15GB.
2. Use 1 consumer-grade service like Google Photos for easy day-to-day access and sharing; just makes life easier for you and your loved ones to access memories on-demand. This can be substituted with any privacy-friendly alternative or young service like Stingle.
3. Use 1 business-grade storage solution for an off-site backup. Business-grade is critical b/c it enhances the relationship and SLA the provider gives you. I use AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive; it's free to upload, cheap to store ($0.00099/GB/month), and a bit pricey to retrieve ($0.09/GB for egress). This is my last-resort/lifeline if everything else goes wrong and I need to get my data again. To save on per-file upload fees, I zip up pictures by album or year and use 7Zip or Keka to encrypt the zip with a password using AES-256 for added privacy. Also remember, AWS is creating at least 3 copies of your data across 3 AZs in one region!
4. Keep a copy of the pictures at home on an NAS, hard drive, or better yet your computer if you have the space. I already use Time Machine to auto backup my entire Mac on an external drive so this gives me in total 2 copies of my pictures (one on laptop and one on time machine backup).
In total this gives me 6 total copies of my pictures:
- 1x Off-site Google Photos
- 3x Off-site AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive
- 1x On-site Laptop
- 1x On-site Laptop's Time Machine Backup
I'm not too concerned if one service provider loses my pics or revokes my access; plenty more copies!
Please remember this only works if you religiously follow step 1. This will be an expensive and almost impractical setup if you enjoy holding onto 5TB+ worth of photos.
Along lines of other comments here, none of my other material has even like the same value as my family photos, so I'm stupendously careful with redundancy / multi location backup.
In case anyone cares: local HDD attached to Mac, Synology on local network, folder on there synced to Dropbox and finally Synology C2. Too far I know, but it's worth it.
Mylio is fast, clever (has a nice P2P model for in-network syncing), doesn't have to hit any cloud service if you don't want it to, good search, great management tools. I rate it highly.
All we need is to have it be interoperable with something like http://CoBox.cloud (a distributed, encrypted, offline-enabled data hosting cloud platform) and we can set up our own fully encrypted, NSA-impenetrable/surveillance-less cooperative community servers/'cloud'.
In other words, we would benefit from the same economies of scale and low maintance costs that the existing FAANG server farms benefit from, without the invasive privacy transgressions from big corps.
Their documentation is super nice too.
It would be easier to believe if F-Droid was also listed.
...which is work in progress[1]
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/storage-data-transfer...
I use Dropbox and a second copy backend up to my personal server (via Dropbox cli) for photos. Owning that data is too important for me to use a random service accessable only via a phone app.
What I'd really love is something I can self host. OwnPhotos seems super cool, but apparently it's not stable yet. Are there any alternatives that can be run today?
Only the client software is Free Software, the server component has not been released, in source or object form.
That sort of calls this whole paragraph into question.
My photo library location is on OneDrive and my phone stream is synced to the Mac.
My Mac is also backed up to NAS.
So my pics are in two different physical locations and one offsite. I guess I should have an external drive that I make regular backups to and then take offsite somewhere as well.
*Some people would suggest side load it but your app needs to be compatible with remote control and TV layout.
I miss the excellent facial tagging that Picasa offered and none of these solutions offers any facial tags.
By that I mean to say that I looked at this and thought “great, an O/S backup solution for a NAS” as opposed to a paid-only service akin to a multitude of others.
