Of Immich and Kdrive

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For weeks I haven’t updated Google Photos because I ran out of storage on the 200 gigabyte tier and I avoid using more than 200 gigabytes of storage with Apple iCloud. If either of them had a 500 GB tier, then I’d consider them. As they do not offer this option I chose to phase them out with Immich and Kdrive.

Immich replaces Google Photos, and iCloud among other apps. it allows me to take photos from a phone and have it backed up on a Raspberry Pi at “home”. I have backed up all the photos that I had on my phones to Immich, so, when iCloud says “storage full” I just delete them from my phone and they are automatically removed from iPhoto. It allows me to have my photo gallery locally.

In a previous age I would have had an app on my laptop, and that’s where photos would have been saved. In this day and age I save them to my self-hosted alternative.

We call it self-hosting, but if we reverted to using desktops with terabytes of storage we would just call it local storage.

Kdrive

For years I was very happy with Google Drive, but not Google Photos. I was not happy with Google Photos because Google Photos saves photos apart from other Google Drive files. This means that if you want to migrate them you first need to export them from Google Photos to Google Drive as Zip files, and then from there, unzip them, and sort out the mess.

In contrast, with Kdrive photos are saved and accessible directly from within Kdrive, and you can sync them between your phone, your cloud Kdrive, and propagate to a drive connected to a local machine.

In my opinion, a good cloud solution is one that is seamless, from your phone while you’re cycling or hiking to the cloud, and from the cloud locally, within your home. When you can seamlessly have your files flowing like this, the situation is ideal.

And Finally

If Apple made it easy to download and store iCloud photos locally then their suiite would be the rational choice. The issue is that when you’re storing 200 GB and you can’t retrieve data, it’s frustrating. When you’re storing 2TB and you can’t get it back that is even worse. Both Google and Apple make the mistake of making it hard to retrieve data.

If I can’t retrieve my data, then the cloud solution is a one direction solutiion but I want it to be a two way street. I want data to be as easy to upload as retrieve. I don’t want to be trapped.

You leap from 3 CHF per month to 10 CHF per month with iCloud, and 100 CHF per year with Google. Do you want to be trapped paying these fees for the rest of your life? I don’t want to be trapped.

Immich is self-hosted and Kdrive is cloud hosted, with easy on-site backup. Of course the biggest advantage is that my data is no longer trapped on a US server.