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.
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.
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’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.
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 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.
@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!
