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?
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.
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’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 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’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.
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?
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!
(Deleted other reply by mistake!)
@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 :)
I’ve got a Synology NAS DS214play 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.
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 nextcloud with restic as a backup to external nfs