Gmail, Drive, and Photos used to be three services that aggressively pushed you to put all your data into them, gave you 10gb each, and in the case of photos offered a nice featured viewer.
Then, they decided to consolidate account storage. Now these services all share a pool of 10gb, and every high quality photo or heavy email from your 10 year old inbox is adding up.
And then, having enshittified it, they start selling you Google backup.
This isn’t working
Google One. Still not that popular…
Okay now let’s have constant nags across all three services, persistently, that warn you you are running out after like 60 or 70 percent full.
I was done when I heard them almost get my girlfriend at the time, as well as my parents with this dark pattern bullshit. I backed up their data immediate and cleared their devices, setup syncthing and started working on hosting an alternative. I hadn’t even learned about immich yet.
Hmm, I just checked and have photos going back to 2011 on there. Most are pictures of pets and ceiling fans. I think I’m realizing I just don’t take photos anymore that aren’t for short term use. I guess if I ever have kids I’d change that. Do you just host it locally? Not familiar with syncthing. Is it something I can spin up a Debian/red hat/whatever choice server and run from there, or is it cloud based on someone else’s hardware
I host a bunch of services now, but Plex, Syncthing and the *arr apps have been my standouts for a while.
Syncthing is a NAT-hopping file sync that uses relays to establish communication over firewalls. Windows/Linux.
Think of the relays like a FPS matchmaking server to setup your file transfer. It’s secure and quite nice. I use it to keep my photos backedup no matter what kind of connection I have. And to sync things like game saves and save states between multiple devices/locations.
Syncthing is great because at the time I didn’t have a NAS or anything like immich running for a more complex solution. Syncthing is just folder syncing. So I synced /photos on my phone and C:\photos on my desktop. The first sync will dump the entire camera folder onto my desktop via syncthing (and anything on the desktop onto my phone, if the folder wasn’t empty). Then on the desktop side when the phone is starting to fill up, I just move the files from C:\photos into C:\photoarchive for example. Syncthing sees that the files are gone, and tells my phone to remove them to stay in sync, so it does, and I get back tons of space.
If nothing else I recommend at least setting up syncthing backup for preserving your data and not paying google a dime. Then if you go down the self-hosted rabbit hole a bit further, learn how to manage docker and setup an immich instance. At that point you can either us a VPN and access it that way via VPN making it “local” or register a domain and point it at your machine and all that. If you’ve never self-hosted a website or page before this can be challenging, and the VPN solution is quite simple, and more secure.
All that said, syncthing is not intuitive at first in my opinion. If you make a synced folder entry in the app, the name of that entry doesn’t have to match the folder, or between devices. At all.
So on your desktop you might name or rename this link to “receive photos” links it to “C:\photos” but on your phone it’s called “sync photos” and links it to “/emulated/0/DCIM/Camera”. See what I mean? They look totally unrelated. But if you look closely they both have a matching ID number from when the folder was shared first.
That sounds nice, because then you can just run a backup service or a raid setup on the shared sync’d folder on the computer and everything should be backed up for all the photo locations.
No problem. Check out the selfhosted subs here and on reddit for some advice if you want to go that direction.
You don’t even need much space or power to start off you’re limiting it to photos and docker services mostly. The vast majority of my data use is my entire family’s collective media vault. A RaspberryPi 4 with an external 2tb is great for lightweight services and networking.
Gmail, Drive, and Photos used to be three services that aggressively pushed you to put all your data into them, gave you 10gb each, and in the case of photos offered a nice featured viewer.
Then, they decided to consolidate account storage. Now these services all share a pool of 10gb, and every high quality photo or heavy email from your 10 year old inbox is adding up.
And then, having enshittified it, they start selling you Google backup.
This isn’t working
Google One. Still not that popular…
Okay now let’s have constant nags across all three services, persistently, that warn you you are running out after like 60 or 70 percent full.
I was done when I heard them almost get my girlfriend at the time, as well as my parents with this dark pattern bullshit. I backed up their data immediate and cleared their devices, setup syncthing and started working on hosting an alternative. I hadn’t even learned about immich yet.
Hmm, I just checked and have photos going back to 2011 on there. Most are pictures of pets and ceiling fans. I think I’m realizing I just don’t take photos anymore that aren’t for short term use. I guess if I ever have kids I’d change that. Do you just host it locally? Not familiar with syncthing. Is it something I can spin up a Debian/red hat/whatever choice server and run from there, or is it cloud based on someone else’s hardware
I host a bunch of services now, but Plex, Syncthing and the *arr apps have been my standouts for a while.
Syncthing is a NAT-hopping file sync that uses relays to establish communication over firewalls. Windows/Linux. Think of the relays like a FPS matchmaking server to setup your file transfer. It’s secure and quite nice. I use it to keep my photos backedup no matter what kind of connection I have. And to sync things like game saves and save states between multiple devices/locations.
Syncthing is great because at the time I didn’t have a NAS or anything like immich running for a more complex solution. Syncthing is just folder syncing. So I synced /photos on my phone and C:\photos on my desktop. The first sync will dump the entire camera folder onto my desktop via syncthing (and anything on the desktop onto my phone, if the folder wasn’t empty). Then on the desktop side when the phone is starting to fill up, I just move the files from C:\photos into C:\photoarchive for example. Syncthing sees that the files are gone, and tells my phone to remove them to stay in sync, so it does, and I get back tons of space.
If nothing else I recommend at least setting up syncthing backup for preserving your data and not paying google a dime. Then if you go down the self-hosted rabbit hole a bit further, learn how to manage docker and setup an immich instance. At that point you can either us a VPN and access it that way via VPN making it “local” or register a domain and point it at your machine and all that. If you’ve never self-hosted a website or page before this can be challenging, and the VPN solution is quite simple, and more secure.
All that said, syncthing is not intuitive at first in my opinion. If you make a synced folder entry in the app, the name of that entry doesn’t have to match the folder, or between devices. At all.
So on your desktop you might name or rename this link to “receive photos” links it to “C:\photos” but on your phone it’s called “sync photos” and links it to “/emulated/0/DCIM/Camera”. See what I mean? They look totally unrelated. But if you look closely they both have a matching ID number from when the folder was shared first.
That sounds nice, because then you can just run a backup service or a raid setup on the shared sync’d folder on the computer and everything should be backed up for all the photo locations.
Thanks for the info!
No problem. Check out the selfhosted subs here and on reddit for some advice if you want to go that direction.
You don’t even need much space or power to start off you’re limiting it to photos and docker services mostly. The vast majority of my data use is my entire family’s collective media vault. A RaspberryPi 4 with an external 2tb is great for lightweight services and networking.