PhotoPrism On a Pi Continued

PhotoPrism On a Pi Continued

Byrichard

After more than a week of working twenty four hours a day my Raspberry Pi 4 finally indexed over 120,000 videos and photos. The first thing that I notice is that Photoprism feels slower now. It takes several seconds and it feels as if it is suffering.

Overloaded with 120,000 Files

The Raspberry Pi 4 and PhotoPrism were not designed to have so many photos at once. It tells me that 63,000 files are videos, which I will remove from this archive eventually. They take an enormous amount of space without having much personal value.

Imagine that you use PhotoPrism to index your video directories, where render files are generated by Final Cut Pro X or other softwares. If those files are indexed then they take up a lot of resources to index but have no value except to the video editing system.

Purging Render Video Files

As an archivist I would often purge the render directories because they can take gigabytes of space when the only file you need is the final edit, as an international version, with no titles, and natural sound.

The Long Tail of Thumbnails

Although I speak of 120,000 images indexed there might be 12 times that number of assets being tracked by PhotoPrism. It generates up to 11 thumbnail images per asset for quick display on different resolution screens, from laptops to desktops, mobile phones and tablets.

12,000 of those video files are live photos, so I need to sort through the other files now that the indexing is finished.

Extra stats

It has found 1365 folders, 725 places, 222 calendar “events”, 57 moments and 59 people so far. It takes a long time to load unrecognised people with PhotoPrism because it is not designed to deal with hundreds of unrecognised faces at once.

Changing Faces

As you go through decades of photos at once you notice the faces that have changed over time. You see how you looked when you were two or three decades longer, and you see how your face has changed over time. You also see how much younger people looked just eight years ago in some cases.

The other challenge is to remember the name of people that you have photographed, and with a decade or two since you saw certain people it’s hard to remember.

If you have no idea of a person’s name you can just mouse over a face and click the x button and that face will cease to be in the database.

No Mass Delete

There is no mass delete option. If you want to delete photos via the web interface you will need patience. It might be better to use wildcards and delete them from the directories, and then refresh the indexes to remove ghost files and index references that no longer have media attached.

And Finally

The next step is to see how to backup the database files so that if photoprism crashes I can restore it, and how to backup the images, so that if the drives fail I do not lose the data. The step after that is to see how differently it behaves on a Raspberry Pi 5. I suspect it will make a huge difference.

Xcursion Fusion in Snow

Xcursion Fusion in Snow

Byrichard

Yesterday it snowed enough for the snow to get some depth. I went for a walk with snowboard trousers, a proper winter coat and the Xero Xcursion Fusion in snow that reached above their rim without getting snow or water onto my socks until I removed the shoes at the end of the walk. They’re minimal waterproof shoes that have “FeelTrue®” soles. These are thin, minimal soles. Despite this my feet felt warm for the entire walk with normal soles.

Fine in Snow

When I was walking on thin snow I felt that the sole might be sliding slightly but this is probably due to the slightly slushy snow, rather than the soles. Sometimes I had to walk in five centimres or more of snow and they still felt fine. I didn’t feel any concern about snow making its way into the shoes, even when walking where grass or fallow fields were growing. They’re very comfortable.

Light and Flexible

The advantage of these shoes is that they’re light and flexible. When you walk with them you can walk with your ordinary stride, rather than one adapted to hiking shoes, or moon boots. I thought that I might feel the cold through the thin soles but no such problem. I could walk normally for one hour and fourty minutes without regretting that I was wearing these shoes. That’s great, because hiking shoes can be 200-300 CHF and I got these for 90 CHF, the same price as my other barefoot shoes that are better in summer, and dry conditions.

I did not expect them to be so comfortable. I thought that water could filter through the top, or the gap between the tongue and the sides of the shoes, or through the soles. I had none of these issues. I would rate these for winter walking with snowboarding trousers without hesitation now. I was pleasantly surprised by how comfortable they were.

When I tested them in heavy rain, walking through puddles I did get water to enter the shoes. With snow they’re fine, because snow isn’t wet until it melts. It’s important to stay dry when freezing conditions could affect your comfort level.

Walking in a Cold Wind

Although not highly scientific I walked in a cold wind two days ago with these shoes and felt no discomfort. It’s not a scientific observation, as I didn’t walk on my hands with my feet in the air. The main point is that despite being minimal I do not find them to be uncomfortable in -2°c with a strong wind and a noticable windchill factor. I didn’t check the “feels like” temperature

The Competition

Originally I wanted to get the Merrel Tail Glove 7 GTX but cancelled my order due to the wait. I also cancelled my order due to the price. The Trail Glove 7 GTX shoes cost from 160-180 CHF whereas the Xero shoes can be bought for 80 CHF if you shop around. The Xero Xcurion Fusion shoes cost as much, or less than the barefoot shoes and they keep my feet dry.

Snow Shovelling

When I finished my walk I noticed that snow had built up on the road outside of the building I live in. I went down to the garage to get a snow shovel and started to shovel the snow. Part of that shovelling requires walking up and down a steep ramp that was covered in snow. I did not slip, or feel that my traction was in danger once. I was in full control the entire time.

And Finally

Usually when it snows you need to wear big, heavy shoes that are more tiring to walk with. With the Xero Xcursion Fusion shoes you have the advantages of ankle height hiking shoes without the weight and bulk. These shoes are light and malleable. They do what your feet are doing, without having to adapt your gait to the shoes. The shoes are well suited to casual snow walking, especially when you have snow trousers with gaiters that prevent any and all snow from entering through the top. That’s how shoes should be.

I believe that these shoes are worth trying, especially if you’re used to the barefoot feel but want something that is seasonally appropriate. I was comfortable both when walking and shovelling snow.

PhotoPrism, Walks in Cold Weather and Migrating to Linux

PhotoPrism, Walks in Cold Weather and Migrating to Linux

Byrichard

A Cold Walk

Yesterday I went out for my daily walk but within minutes I noticed that my legs felt cold and that I really did need the scarf that I wore. It’s exceptional for me to wear a scarf. My fleece and my inner coat both have neck protection built in so I usually feel fine. Yesterday was unusually cold so I was happy to add the scarf to really keep my neck warmer. I removed it for a few minutes because it felt itchy but I soon put it back on.

PhotoPrism is Still Indexing

In the meantime PhotoPrism has been chugging away, indexing tens of thousands of files and adding location information as well as other metadata. It has indexed 60,000 files of which 20,000 are videos. Most of the video files are junk though, stuff I saved that has no personal value. I’m marking the video files as private and I will probably delete them as they take teraybtes of space without having much value.

Migrating to a Linux Machine

I also experimented with migrating my blog writing from this mac to a Linux machine. I managed to gh clone the blog files from github to my local linux machine but struggled a little with uploading the test file from the linux machine to the web server. While writing this blog post I was reminded of the solution that should work.

My mac is old and I suspect that at some point the battery will fail and I will lose access to it. I already had to swap the battery once and soon it will die again, and that’s when I will stop using it.
I considered swapping the battery a second time but I saw that Apple is about to stop support for it. If I can use a Linux machine instead, then I save money.

And Finally

Walking in challenging weather is good. It requires us to equip ourselves better, to remain comfortable, whether it’s cold, rainy, windy, or a heatwave. By migrating from Google Photos to PhotoPrism I can keep photos and videos locally rather than in the cloud, and access them with ease, as well as slide from the cheapest service to the cheapest service without investing days or weeks in the effort.

Sliding from Mac to Linux is about learning, and cutting costs, but mainly about experimentation and learing about a different OS. It’s good to be comfortable on Windows, Linux and Mac. At least now if, and when, the mac fails I will be ready to slide from one device to the other.

Playing with the Xiaomi Band 7

Playing with the Xiaomi Band 7

Byrichard

I have had the Xiaomi Band 7 for a while but I didn’t wear it properly until the start of the new year. As a silly concept I thought that I would try to wear it for the entire year and so far I have kept to that resolution. Sometimes it’s worth trying the cheapest device that you can find to see how it differs from the flagships by Suunto, Garmin and Apple.

PAI

The first thing that I enjoy is that it has the PAI indicator. The Personal Activity Index. The idea is that you should reach 100 points per week. If you go for a run you can get 45 points within an hour or so. If you walk for one and a half hours you may get 18 points or more. It’s just to indicate whether you have exercised enough, without putting pressure on high energy sports like cycling, running and others.

Training Load

It also gives you an indication of training load. The four categories are low, optimal, high, and very high. Despite just walking for the last seven days the indicator is at a high value for me, with a training load of 193 over the last seven days.

Sleep Tracking

Recently I have found sleep trackers less reliable than I used to. The main reason is that I let various watches and fitness trackers guess when I am sleeping, rather than telling me. If I get up in the night then it discards the first stage of sleep and just tracks from the moment I went back to sleep. I used to track sleep nightly, but with time I lost interest. When you have tracked at least a thousand nights the results are less captivating. I also started to worry about how quickly it was affecting mobile phone battery longevity.

Seven Day Battery

Whilst on the topic of longevity, one of the key advantages of the Activity Band 7 is that the battery lasts for seven days or more, between charges. You place it on your wrist and forget it for seven days. Apple Watches prove to be especially frustrating because you have to charge them every 18 hours and the charge time can be from two and a half to three and a half hours long. It tends to need to charge just as I want to walk, rather than at a reasonable time. With the Band 7 this isn’t an issue.

And Finally

I like the simplicity of the device. Tracking walks, runs and more is easy. It uses the phone for GPS tracking so this enables the device itself just to count steps and measure heart rate. Some people might want more but if you always walk, run, and more, with your phone, then this is a great device. It’s light and small on the wrist. It has a wealth of displays to chose from. I chose a mountain landscape, with the digital time. For 40-50 CHF this could be a good device for children and non geeks, as long as the parents and teachers tolerate children listening whilst fiddling, rather than fighting to stay awake in class.

Sliding Between MacOS, Windows and Linux Daily

Sliding Between MacOS, Windows and Linux Daily

Byrichard

Recently I have been sliding between Windows, Linux distributions and MacOS throughout the day. I use a mac for blogging, and Linux to experiment and learn new skills, and windows to watch Netflix and YouTube. I might be over-simplifying but that’s the simplified version.

Pi and Linux

I find that I have come to be at ease in all three environments, especially since playing around with Raspberry Pi devices. “Why?”, you may ask. Because with a Pi you can try dedicated images for Nextcloud, for PhotoPrism, for Immich and more. You can also try them for Ph-Hole and others. The advantage is also that you use microSD cards. This means that you slot in card A and try A1, then you slot B and try B1 and finally you try C with C1. In the end you’re trying instances with what could be thirty seconds with your Pi being a PhotoPrism server, before it becomes a NextCloud server, and so on. With enough SD cards if you mess up you can revert to something that you enjoyed using with a minute or two.

MacOS

I am using the Mac for blogging for one key reason. The git history for this blog has become too big for a sync in a single go and I need to learn how to sync just the last 10 changes, rather than the entire history, but that requires RTFM. I haven’t taken that time yet. It’s not laziness. It’s about having more interesting projects to work on before reaching this one.

Windows

I use the windows machine for media viewing habits because it’s plugged in to external screens and a monitor whereas the other two aren’t. I practiced using Chocolatey and PowerShell, as well as other windows related experiments. I also use it for flashing linux SD cards. It’s good at that because it has an SD card reader built in so I don’t need a dongle.

And Finally

In the 80s, as a child I played with the CLI, and norton commander, and DOS, and Windows 3.1. I installed games and chose sound cards and more. I used to see displays that recently I have seen quite regularly. It’s interesting that the CLI interface to NextCloud reminds me of when I was playing with computers as a child in the 80s. For decades I left the CLI behind, but now I’m back. I use it daily at the moment.

When I first started playing with Linux in the 90s I had to download the ROM, burn a CD or a DVD, and then attempt to install the OS on a computer. I would often succeed, and sometimes fail. Now, you don’t need to burn a DVD. You just flash a microSD card and you’re ready to go. You don’t even need to prepare a USB key, and wait for an install on a desktop. Experimentation is faster now.

The next step is to install Nextcloud, HomeAssistant, Pi-hole and PhotoPrism to play nicely on a single device.

Migrating Media Assets from Google Photos to PhotoPrism

Migrating Media Assets from Google Photos to PhotoPrism

Byrichard

Yesterday I started the proper migration of my Google Photo assets from Google Takeout to PhotoPrism. The first step was to mount the drives to the linux system, the second was to transfer the photos from the external hard drive to the internal SD card, unzip them, and then start imposing assets.

The first bottle neck is exporting 800 gigabytes from Google drive to a local drive. I chose to download the files in one gigabyte packages in fifty gigabyte sets over many hours. This depends on your connection so the experience will vary.

Moving Between Disks

The second bottle neck is when moving the files from an external hard drive to a microsd card. The transfer can be quite time consuming which is part of my reason for using a Pi, rather than a laptop. A laptop would be much faster but it will time out unless you tell it not to sleep. The issue with that is that laptops are not designed to be un for days at a time, without sleeping every so often. Once the Pi is working you can leave it to work.

Ideally I would keep the files on the external drive and skip this time consuming step. I wanted to test the feasability of using an SD card, to keep things tidy once the time consuming phase is over.

Unzipping

PhotoPrism needs files to be unzipped to work. This can be a time consuming task if you do so with the Pi, rather than a laptop or desktop. I would recommend unzipping the files ahead of moving the files from an external drive to an internal drive. At the time of writing I did not find a quick way of unzipping files with a single command.

Importing From the Import Folder

PhotoPrism has an import folder. This is where you extract your unzipped Google Takeout Folders to. Select “move files” to delete all files that have been automatically imported. Click import and then PhotoPrism does the rest. This is the stage that takes the most time. PhotoPrism orgqanises the photos by year, month, date, location, tags, and people. This is the stage where you can go for a walk, or enjoy a good night of sleep because it will take hours to complete.

I am not clear whether the JSON files for images are always zipped within the same archive or whether they are zipped once every few files. This is part of my reason for experimenting with ingesting several gigabytes at a time, rather than one folder at a time. The second reason is that if I give it tasks that take hours it gives me no excuse to procrastinate. That’s what I did before writing this blog post.

Recognising Faces

PhotoPrism recognises faces but it doesn’t create a “person” until it has several images. When it does have several images it gives you the opportunity to name that face, or add it to a pre-existing face. It’s nice to watch as faces from your past re-appear, and amusing when you realise how many names you have forgotten, as well as seeing which ones you clearly remember.

Recognising Places

At the moment when I am writing this post it has recognised 200 places and 15 states. When it recognises a place you can search by country via the search tool, or by location with the map. States are towns, villages or regions. This is a useful way of organising photos because it shows how much you travel, but also how many places you have been to, once you zoom in enough.

Cameras

This tool, by reading EXIF info, makes it possible to search for photos by camera. You can search for 360 photos with insta360 or photos from years ago with canon s70 or Canon EOS 5 MkII etc.

Categories

If you’re looking for photos of food, or aircrafts, or goats, or sheep, or monuments, or historical, you can. It also allows you to seach by colours, for example teal for grass and diving or blue for sunny days and more.

Years and Months

It is possible to search by year or by month, or both. You can search for December images to see if you can find images of snow, or you can search for June and yellow to find images of drought.

Import and Log

Two tabs that I spent time watching last night when I first started to import Google Photos properly were “import” and “log”.

The import tab is important because it allows you to know whether files are being imported or not so this allows you to decide whether to import more images or not. I prefer to import 50 gigabytes, clear the import directory, and then import the next 50 gigabytes, rather than to leave it to run for hours and assume that everything was imported correctly. If something fails I like to know when it’s easier to fix. So far I am under the impression that photos are, at the very least, imported into folders by year and month, as well as indexed automatically based on content.

I like to watch the logs to see if errors occur, but also to see when new faces are recognised, whether thumbnails are being generated correctly as well as when a new face cluster is ready to be named.

Making Photos and Videos Private

With PhotoPrism you can set several images or videos as private at once. You select the first image and then before clicking the last image press shift as you click and it will select that range. You can then click on the lock and those images or videos will be marked as private. Having the ability to select a range of images and apply changes, such as privacy is useful. I use privacy as an example but you could just as easily add a country, or keyword, or anything else.

The Index Tab

I realise that I should mention the index tab. Indexing runs automatically, as soon as it detects images in a directory or a mounted drive it will attempt to index those files which is both useful and likely to cause a mess. Luckily PhotoPrism comes with a “cleanup” tool to make clearing up orphan files and tidying the index easier.

It’s Fast

Despite indexing thousands of files, adding metadata, recognising colours, adding categories and labels, as well as generating thumbnails it’s fast. I can load images almost instantly when scrolling up and down. This is despite running on a Pi whilst it’s working hard. This is a great self-hosted alternative to Google Photos and iPhotos. Remember, before cloud storage was a default tools like Picasa existed, and these were great for organising photos. The difference is that now they’re cloud solutions where the cloud is your home Raspberry Pi rather than an app on your phone or laptop.

User Roles

When you use PhotoPrism for free you can have just one user. If you pay 2 Euros per month you can have “Super Admin, Admin, User, Viewer, Guest” accounts. This allows you to create individual users, to add friends and family.

Cloud Option

If you don’t desire to have your own private instance running at home you have a cloud based solution that starts at 6.50 Euros per month but it’s unclear what the cost is for storage.

And Finally

Initially I thought that I would use Nextcloud for media asset management but when it failed to display video files as thumbnails and when I saw that I couldn’t easily get rid of orphan index entries I hesitated between Immich and PhotoPrism. What made me commit to PhotoPrism is that I saw that they had a tool to import from Google Takeout built in. Instead of spending hours or even days or weeks re-organising photos the software would do it for me.

Adobe Lightroom costs 99 CHF per year. Kyno by LessPain Software costs 150 Euros per year and CatDV costs several thousand CHF to purchase. If you know how to setup PhotoPrism you can save money, or upgrade the hard drive to a higher capacity once per year, to ensure less risk of drive failure due to age.

Of Tablets and Phones and Raspberry Pis

Of Tablets and Phones and Raspberry Pis

Byrichard

This morning when driving back from the shops I heard someone in a podcast say that his fourteen year old niece was disgusted at the thought of using a laptop rather than a mobile phone and it made me think of something. In the age of iOS and Android devices replacing computers it makes sense to setup Raspberry Pi as Nextcloud servers, photoprism servers, Pi Holes and more. It makes sense becaue if we move away from the laptop and the desktop then we come across a serious limitation. Storage.

Apple Cost of Storage

There is a 160 CHF difference between a 64GB iPhone SE and a 256GB iPhone SE for example. With the Mac Book Air 13″ you pay a minimum of 1100 CHF for 256GB of storage and 1900 CHF for 2TB of storage. With the iPad Mini you range from 64 GB for 571 CHF to 256GB for 741.70CHF.

A Cheaper shared Option

A Raspberry Pi 4 8GB will cost 110 CHF at the time of writing and a one TB SDXC card will cost 106 CHF. For 200 CHF and Nextcloud you have a low wattage storage solution that is always on and always available when you are on the home network.

Cloud backup

With such a solution you can take one hundreds of pictures during a hike or night out, and back them up to your home nextcloud instance. You can then either link two nextcloud intances in different buildings, or find the cheapest cloud storage solution. iCloud is 120 CHF per year, Google One is 100 CHF per year and Kdrive is just 67 CHF per year.

By having a full backup in your home you can slide between cloud storage solutions more easily because you don’t need to wait for days while all the files download.

NextCloud and Mobile Devices

With Nextcloud you have time tracking options so you can keep track of the projects you’re working on as well as how much you’re owed, if the time tracked has monetary value. With the Passwords plugin for nextcloud you can replace onepass, lastpass and other password solutions.

With the memories add on you can view photos and videos as moments in time, by people, and more. It also logs locations and more, but rather than Google or Apple knowing about this, your own server does.

It has word processors, project management tools, task tools, Kanban boards and more. It’s versatile.

Pi Hole

When you’re surfing the web adverts can become really annoying, either by auto-playing, or by just taking a lot of space on a screen. By routing DNS requests from your server to Pi Hole you can reduce the amount of bandwidth used by ads on mobile devices.

CUPS Server

Although quite boring you can setup a Pi to work as a CUPS print server. Plug a Pi running CUPS into a printer and you can set it up. With this move you don’t need to plug in a laptop every time you want to print. Since Apple went to USB C this has become especially annoying because you need to find the USB dongle each time.

PhotoPrism

PhotoPrism is an interesting photo management tool that allows you to import photos that have been exported from Google Takout. It also has two apps, PhotoPrismUpload and Photosync. It automatically organises photos according to EXIF data and machine learning models.

Immich is similar and offers more control of users but feels less complete, for now.

HomeAssistant

Home Assistant, like Google Home and Apple Home is a home automation tool where you can add aranet devices, netatmo devices, your Apple TV and mobile phones. With this device you can keep track of your steps via the iphone and other devices.

It can detect when you leave home, and when you return, as well as whether you’ve been walking, stationary and more.

It also provides you with monitoring of Nextcloud instances, to see if they are under heavy loads, or light loads, but also, via the history feature, to see how things are changing over time.

Tailscale

With the free tier of Tailscale you can have up to three people and 100 devices connected to a single VPN. With Tailscale VPN active on your Pi devices and mobile devices you can access your instances of Nextcloud, Pi Hole, Home Assistant, Photoprism and more, whether you’re at home, or using the 4g network. Image backup and sharing doesn’t have to wait until you’re home to happen. This gives you the flexibility and freedom of iCloud and Google Drive, without going through their servers. Everything stays within your own reality, if you so desire.

And Finally

In a Pi home you can almost do away with laptops, to replace them with Raspberry Pi. These devices can serve as video servers via apps like Plex, or photo sharing tools via Photoprism. They can also keep your other files safe, and accessible, as long as you’re on the Tailscale VPN. You can even print from your mobile device to a CUPS accessible printer, at least in theory.

For future generations that prefer mobile phones, and tablets, to computers, the age of Pi makes sense. When discussions took place, that talked about the shift away from laptops and desktops, they didn’t mention that self-hosting would thrive as a result. Self-hosting is about setting up thin clients as servers to enable people to do things via web interfaces and apps. I got a few instances to work, over a period of weeks, so now I see how the thin client age requires static machines like Pi to provide services.

I think the age of Bare Bone PCs will be interesting.

What’s Old Is New Again – Live Google Location Sharing

What’s Old Is New Again – Live Google Location Sharing

Byrichard

Almost two decades ago we had Google Latitude. Google Latitude allowed us to share real time location with friends and family 24 hours a day. We didn’t need to ask “Where are you” because there was already an app for that. Today I saw “Google’s real-time location is here: this is how it works” as a headline. I have to ask, do the writers study their history before writing their articles or is anything that wasn’t in their own lifetime brand new?

This is an old feature from the mid to late 2000s that was removed bit by bit because people worried about privacy complained. We went from being able to share our location 24 hours a day to it being on demand for a limited time, to having a lifetime history of locations to it being removed from new users.

I am grandfathered in to the original Google Latitude so I have location history spanning back to 2007-2008 or so. I love this, because it allows me to see when I travelled, and how fast I travelled. If I see that I got from Spain to Switzerland in an hour I know I went by plane. If I see that I went from Geneva to Frankfurt, and from Frankfurt to Romania or Poland then I know that was another flight. I can see where I was and when.

I can also see how much I cycled and walked, and how much I drove or took trains in a month. With iCloud you have live location sharing too, but it’s restricted to the people you want to share with, for example when you’re driving from A to B, or when you have family sharing enabled.

Years ago I said that I don’t mind Google or Apple, or other companies knowing where I am, because telecom providers have that information anyway, so if they have it, so should I. My fvourite use was to check “The car got a fine at this location on that day but at that time on that day I was at the gym so I wasn’t the one driving the car.

By sharing your location with Google latitude it gives you information about whether an event could have been you or not. I wasn’t worried about the fine, or paying it. I wanted to confirm that my drivers were not slipping back into the habit of getting fines again. At one time I drove so much that fines were no longer rare. I eventually saw phantom flashes and switched to always setting the limiter to the speed limit.

And Finally

It boils down to one phrase. Live location sharing with Google is not new. It was removed because people worried about Google knowing too much about where they had been and where, and they wanted to remove location history. Now we are finally seeing the reverse coming back into being. Live location sharing, as well as location history is useful. I am happy to see that it is coming back.

Raspi Config and Nextcloud Portability

Raspi Config and Nextcloud Portability

Byrichard

Yesterday when I tried to migrate nextcloud between two locations I used one that I installed from scratch and when I got to another network I was unable to use it. In the evening when I got home I re-installed Nextcloud but this time I used the NextcloudPi package, rather than installing it myself. I tested sudo raspi-config and went to change the SSID. When I saw that I could do this I decided that it was safe for another experiment this morning.

Sudo Raspi Config

Although it sounds like nothing having “sudo raspi-config” available is key to making a Pi install flexible enough to “travel” with. If you can play with the config from this interface all you need is a keyboard and a monitor and you can do what you need, with ease.

The second part of the experiment, although only glimpsed at, just now, was to connect to the Pi remotely. It worked with ease. If you setup a Pi for yourself, or for someone else, that is in a remote location remote access is key. It means that you can take care of system updates, upgrades and more, without needing to go to a location in person. Remote access isn’t just limited to administrative tasks.

Remote Backup

With a Nextcloud, Immich or Photoprism device you want to be able to access it remotely to update data from site A to site B, but also from a mobile phone while you’re at a café, or walking. If you can backup your photos while you’re driving back from a day’s hiking or cycling then you can afford for your phone to be lost, or smashed to pieces. If you’re climbing then that isn’t so far fetched. Having written this, don’t litter.

And Finally

If you setup a Raspberry Pi with Nextcloud, Immich or Photoprism you can get the same functionality as you get from iCloud or Google Photos, but also as from a NAS from Synology, for a fraction of the price. You also gain the freedom to migrate Data from the cheapest cloud solution to the next on a whim, if you already have a local backup of your data. For years mine was trapped in the cloud and I only just released it from there and now I have more freedom to choose cloud services.

Wifi and Hope with Raspberry Hopping

Wifi and Hope with Raspberry Hopping

Byrichard

I had a theory that if I wanted to I could transport a raspberry pi running ubuntu server from one place to another and connect by wifi, with a little tweak, or by ethernet if that didn’t work and today that thought was proved wrong. I spend at least an hour experimenting, before calling it a day, because of lunch time, rather than a loss of desire to find a solution.

I had the theory that if you plugged an ethernet cable into a Pi it would become visible on the network with ease but this didn’t seem to be the case. The Pi wasn’t happy. It was configured for one wifi hotspot but when I tried to change the config file for a second wifi access point it simply didn’t work.

Two Things I Learned

There are two things I learned. The first is that raspi-config works when you have Raspian installed. it doesn’t work when you have a flavour of linux installed. The second problem I encountered was that the tools which various sites, including Bard and Chat GPT recommended required a working connection to download the tools that they recommended. I tried this, but had no luck, because for some reason the ethernet network was not detected.

The lesson is that I should download those tools before migrating a Pi from one location to another, so that if I encounter such an issue I have a simpler UI that works, rather than modifying config files by hand, and failing. I wrote failing but this wasn’t a failure. My entire goal was to take a Pi, configured for one environment and transpose it into a second. It didn’t work and I familiarised myself with the tools I need to install before attempting such an experiment again.

The Beauty of Pi

Don’t forget. One of the strengths of Pi is that you can download instances and install them on microSD cards. You can attempt something with one card, and when it fails swap it for a second and try a variant, until you succeed. If you succeed you can remove that SD card, run an experiment, and see if that experiment works, before reverting to the original card with the install that works.

The beauty of Raspberry Pi, and staring and stopping instances is that you can try various ways of doing the same thing several times, and make mistakes, and invest time in learning how to problem solve, before achieving your goal and moving forward. In this situation the experiment was the goal, so my ideal outcome was not reached, but the opportunity to learn was.

And Finally

With today’s experiment I learned that to make a Raspberry Pi running Ubuntu easier to port from wifi network to wifi network, for example to backup a phone while traveling, I need to add the network manager tools. If I had done that my day’s experiment would have been a success. I also learned that raspi config is not on Ubuntu installs via the Raspberry Pi imager, and this is a useful thing to learn. Now I can see whether I can recover the system before having dinner.