I’m considering setting up a NAS to backup my stuff and replace Google Photos. Currently I’m looking at Asustor AS6704T and Synology DS923+, with the former having more powerful hardware and hardware encoding, and the latter having a better first party software experience.
Some quick comparisons show me that Synology Photos is infinitely better than Asustor Photo Gallery. AI face recognition, content tagging, and reverse Geocoding are features I’ve gotten used to in Google photos, which Synology has and Asustor doesn’t.
I’m also aware of but not really familiar with other photo backup/management solutions, namely Immich, Photoprism, Piwigo, and Lychee. Immich would probably fit me the best, but Piwigo with plugins would support Photosphere photos that I occasionally take with my Pixel.
So I guess I’m asking you guys what your preferred photo backup solution is? I probably should mention that I personally take photos with a Pixel (jpg and MP4 files), but my family uses iPhones (heic and mov files). No RAW photos for now, but for those who do and would edit photos, how would you manage them?
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Immich is rapidly growing into the closest solution for replacing google photos. It’s not fully there yet, but there is very active development going on and it’s advancing quickly.
Wow, you’re not kidding. Looks like they’re going for an close copy of the UI:
Will be great to see how this progresses.
Yep, I’ve recently set up Immich for myself and am really happy with it so far. Certainly some things could be improved, but it is really great for what it is and its somewhat short development history so far.
I’m using Synology, it’s good enough but I don’t like that the software is not Free Software. In the long run I will probably need to build something from scratch manually.
But if you’re using Synology Photos then I wrote some scripts for it https://github.com/jeena/synology-pictures one which randomly finds pictures of family members and puts them into a place where another script (Home Assistant) then shows them on the TV if nobody is watching anything.
And another one which does this “Today, X years ago” also for family members and pushes it into our Matrix family chat.
I’ve struggled with trying to find an alternative to Google Photos that actually works well enough, and reliably enough, for me to feel comfortable enough to fully replace it. I’ve tried everything on the Awesome Selfhosted list that would be a potential competitor, but nothing comes close to Google Photos. It’s honestly just such a solid product it’s really hard to find an open source/selfhosted replacement that works at least as well. And Google Photos is just so convenient when it comes to shared albums, it’s just slick.
My ideal solution would be to have Google Photos remain the source of truth, but have something else as a secondary backup. I looked into the idea of using Rclone to mount Google Photos and another backend (ie. Wasabi), and just replicating periodically from Google Photos to another location. But unfortunately at this time (and maybe forever), the Google Photos API doesn’t allow you to access photos/videos in their original form, only compressed. But I want the originals of course, so this doesn’t fly. The next thing I’ll be looking into when I have more time is automating Google Takeout periodically to fetch the original quality photos/videos, then upload to a backup location. But it’s such a janky idea and it rubs me the wrong way… But it might be the only way. Rclone would have been so perfect if only it could get the original quality content, but that’s on Google not enabling that capability.
I’ve been using a Synology for quite some time, and I started using Synology Photos when it was first released. I’ve got somewhere around 85,000 photos in it now, and it’s been great.
Face recognition pales compared to Google’s, but I feel that’s to be expected given the slight difference in computational resources.
I back up my phone, my wife’s phones (work and home), and our DSLR photos. It works as expected and has been rock solid.
I’ve used it on a DS1019+ and now have it running on a DS1821+.
I’ve tried photoprism and while I was quite impressed, it wasn’t quite there for me.
My most important feature by far is automatic backup and I’ve had zero issues outside of having to reauthenticate occasionally.
As always, YMMV… But it’s been great for me.
as someone else said, Immich has been good. you have to note that it backs up your photos from your phone to a server. The upload client is quite good, though there are times that it logs out the app when you upgrade the immich back end.
As for 3-2-1 type backups, i really want them to add a S3 type back up. I am not convinced that my server will live for ever, and i want to be able to restore from another location.
As for the other features in immich, i use the object detection a lot more than i expected, but i dont really use the face recognition yet (it is relatively new addition, so still needs work).
It also has a “partner” feature, that allows you to also view the photos from your partners account (if they approve).
As for backing up your entire library, i have not bulk uploaded all of my photos yet, and it does not write meta-data into the files, so it is a bit of lock in, though i think they are looking at side car files to allow you to move.
The webview is great, and the app is pretty good, though neither are perfect.
As someone else said, they are rapidly adding features and it is getting a decent userbase.
i can recommend it.
Another vote for Immich. It does a good job.
I think I’m going to rely on first party apps built into Asustor or Synology if I ever want to do S3 backups.
What do you mean by “it’s a bit of lock in”? So say you have a photo with the wrong date in the EXIF file, or if you want to manually write in EXIF data to photos without it, does that mean you couldn’t?
if you add meta-data, like the object detection, faces, albums, descriptions, tags etc. They are not written to the file, but stored in a DB.
So if you want to move somewhere, or edit your photos with a different tool, it will not be a pleasant experience.
Note: i love immich, and by far it is the most easy to use photo system i have that fits my needs. I really like the web view and the sharing capability.
Glad Synology photos have been working great for you! Really considering it as a setup and forget solution.
Does Synology photos have content aware tagging like search for dogs, food, landscape, etc.? It’s not a must for me but would be nice to have. And if the AI face detection got someone wrong, are you able to fix it or merge the same faces? Thanks!No, it doesn’t have content aware functionality. I really wish it did, though having tried it with photoprism, I wasn’t impressed. Most of my pictures tagged with cat wither had no animal, or my dog. Maybe 150 out of 5000 cat pictures (my wife and I have been taking digital photos since the late 90s) got tagged as having a cat in them.
If the facial recognition is wrong, you can correct it, yes.
I’d say it’s a bit less accurate than Lightroom if you’ve used that for recognition.
Like many others have said, I’m keeping an eye on immich and plan to try it soon just to see!
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I’ve been using Google photos for years but I’m pretty keen to move to something open source and self hosted
Immich is very close to google photos, but it shouldn’t be used as your only backup of photos as its under development and changesao lot.
I auto upload to nextcloud and immich, nextcloud is good for storing them and immich is good for viewing them.
Yeah I think I would combine it with synching and back in time for redundancy and backup
I have a Synology NAS and use the Photos/Memories app from Synology to back up my photos from my phone. It works pretty well. Every so often the app will stop syncing unless you open it. I haven’t had that problem in a few months, so it may be solved.
I just recently set up Immich and haven’t tested syncing from phone yet. I did upload a bunch of photos through the web interface to play around. Face recognition “mostly” works. If for some reason it doesn’t see two pictures of the same person as being the same person there is no way to forcibly merge. Likewise, if it sees two people as being the same person, there is no way to forcibly split them.
I do have Piwigo setup to host other images. Didn’t know about plugins for syncing; I’ll have to try that out.
Thanks for the input! Do setting up multiple apps mean having to set up different photo databases/folders? Or can they share the same folders and photos?
I don’t run the immich server on my Synology. That is my safe back up of files before going to could storage. If hate for a glitch in immich to wipe out my local backup.So I really can’t say for sure.
I just recently finished setting Immich with weekly encrypted backup to cloud storage. Really pleased with how it works, as it pretty much feels like an exact Google Fotos foss alternative. Only gribe is image search, but I’m sure its just me not using it correctly.
I use PiGallery 2. Very lightweight and doesn’t mess with my existing folderstructure. I use syncthing to upload photos from my phone to a folder on my server.
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Heavy user of PhotoPrism here (75000+) and I LOVE it - can’t recommend it enough. Easy to self-host, decent face recognition, ok video support (with HW transcoding if present). Still under very active development but very full-featured already.
Are there multiple-users yet on the open source edition?
I use it, but haven’t upgraded this year yet.
Yes, the latest upgrade has full multi-user support. You still cannot separate pictures by users (i.e. one instance still manages one library, with multiple users have different rights in that library), but that is coming “soon”.
Ah, well at this point since it is listed as a feature of their 72€/year tier I think I might go with “never” 😅
I agree it’s rather pricey, all-in-all. That said, I feel like I’m supporting a dev & community/project manager to actually make a living of a project that really does matter do me, especially also in its ability to be self-hosted. In my later years, I’ve become a lot more inclined to support the software I use, especially if I can self-host or it makes the world a better place.
Fair, I feel the same way and I wish I had the money for that. If I paid that price for every FOSS service I use I would be paying around 150€ per month just for software I use periodically or frequently to become independent from corporations lol
Though I would prefer a “pay what you want” to get the features for non-enterprise, but I know that most people would take advantage of that.
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I haven’t updated this year yet because by April they had none, but do they have multi-user implemented yet?
I see it on the featurelist as the 73€ per year plan, but as far as I knew, it wasn’t implemented. I thought they said it would come to the normal version earlier?
I just want to use it will 2 named users for me and my girlfriend lol
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Nextcloud + the app “Photos for Nextcloud”
Good enough general suggestion. The Nextcloud app for phones is still awful though, it fails to show contents of large folders/won’t update their contents to this day (this issue is years old), which is particular relevant for photo and video backups. Also, video playback in the browser is limited as there is no automatic transcoding and not all browsers like all video codecs.
Edit: Just to clarify, I’m running Nextcloud myself and it’s not always too friendly to the “look, you don’t have to use Google for everything!”-attitude I like to show towards friends and family.
true, that’s why i’m probably switching to Immich for that, even with caching enabled Nextcloud is more useful for storing than to go and look to old photos. It’s just slow to load the content, could be that my network is already really slow by itself tho.
I would say it’s more an acceptable solution than a real alternative for now.
I really like Nextcloud, but I really think it’s not (or not only) your network. ;)
@dontblink @falkerie71 I loved nextcloud photos until my photo collection grew and it took forever for nextcloud to load them. I believe it was trying to parse through the complete picture folder. Maybe there was something wrong with my selfhosted instance but it became unusable for me after a while.
@falkerie71 I generally backup my phone to my main NAS and have syncthing configured to Sync my main NAS to backup NAS. My primary NAS is now discontinued WD ex4 and backup NAS is truenas running as a VM on proxmox.
The biggest issue I have with auto backup is that it backs up all the photos including the auto downloaded media from Whatsapp that I have no need to retain.I also use Syncthing with SyncTrayzor to sync files between my devices! Doesn’t Syncthing have the “ignore patterns” function? You can use that to ignore certain folders like your Whatsapp folder I think!
@falkerie71 I have honestly not played with it enough to see if certain folders on my phone can be ignored. Would be great if there is an option. I was more like it works and I am not going to touch it ever again :)
Adding a factor to the mix, what about mobile clients?
Personally I use Nextcloud for the auto-upload, but it’s more of a Google Drive/Office 365 replacement than a Google Photos one.
I’m using nextcloud with restic as a backup to external nfs
I’ve got a Synology NAS DS416play for several years now as a trusty backup/storage. But not using their Photo Galary feature. What I like about Synology is their long term support. They still offer software updates for this rather old model.
I’m still using Google Photos as main photo dumping ground as it has clients for iOS and macOS which automatically uploads all photos there and of course for the search and sharing feature. I’m even paying for the extra storage needed to host all the family pictures on a 2TB plan.
My concern having only the Synology would be that in case of fire/flood/zombies I’d loose all this stuff. Sure it’s a 4 disk raid, but I’d have to make regular backups off-site. Which is pita and expensive as well. Synology does offer Backup to various cloud locations though. But overall I considered this more expensive than just paying for the Google Account.
I use syncthing to upload my Android phone photos to my Unraid server and then use Photoprism to manage them. I use Duplicacy to backup photos (and other data) to Backblaze. I tried Immich briefly and just preferred the setup and look/feel of Photoprism. To be fair, that was about a year and a half ago, and I know both apps have grown a lot since then.
Been using a Synology DS920+ for a few years now, using Moments as my photo backup/viewer.
I will note, however, that the newer version of Synology OS doesn’t run Moments, but “Photos”, and that one lacks subject recognition.
For me, subject recognition was the key reason for even using Google Photos, so to lose that feature upgrading to the latest OS would be a major step backwards.
Just wanted to put that out there for anyone who’s considering buying a new Synology NAS (with the latest OS).
