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.
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 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.
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 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 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.
What’s your gripe with image search if I may ask?
If I want to search for say location or filename, I have to insert “m:” first. Wiki and the app says its for searching metadata instead of smart search, but anything else just leaves me with a server error. I’m certain its just something I have misconfigured, but still a little annoying that it wouldn’t at least fall back to metadata search.
@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!
