The End of ‘Clouded’ Judgement

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If I was up to mischief I would say that some people, especially Apple users, suffer from clouded judgement. Of course I mean this as a pun. If you use Android devices, or Windows machines, or Linux, you can purchase a microSD card and within seconds have one or even two terabytes of extra storage. With such a vast amount of storage you can keep decades of photos and videos with greater freedom.

The Apple Tax

With an iPhone, or a Mac laptop upgrading internal memory will cost hundreds, if not thousands. In the case of cloud storage you’d go from 3 CHF per month to 10 CHF per month, whether you need 201 GB or 1.98TB. With iPhones you have the same tax. 128GB iphones are cheaper but the OS will take up almost all of your space. You’re effetively stuck with 20GB to play with. You could spend on a 256GB phone but the cost difference is large. It’s more than the price of an SD card.

A Pi In the Era of the AI Tax

When you consider the 400 CHF leap in price, then self-hosting photos on a Raspberry Pi via Immich or Photoprism makes financial sense, even with the current AI tax because for four hundred CHF you could get a Pi5 and a one terabyte NVMe drive. One of my instances of Immich is happy with a 500 GB NVMe drive.

The advantage of this solution is that it’s "portable", in that you can travel with it, if required, or you can pre-seed your "offsite" backup.

The Pleasure of Your Full Library Being Online

As I learn about self-hosting and managing photo libraries with open source solutions, so I rediscover photos that bring back memories that are clear in my mind, but that been hidden away behind years of unrefreshed memories.

It isn’t just that I’m playing with AI, and the command line, and open source solution. It’s that I’m removing barriers that went up years ago, especially when I downgraded from the Google One Drive 2TB plan. That’s when I lost the convenience of an easy to browse and access library. That’s the "clouded judgement" that I alluded to earlier. The idea, that although the cloud is a backup solution, it is not a convenient backup solution in the same way that local backups are.

The Folder Based Library

It’s worth highlighting, once again, that my primary library is a chronologically organised series of folders filled with photos, organised by year, month and day. Photoprism and Immich are just the UI/gallery. If I choose to I can slide to another platform simply by pointing the docker compose file to the right folder, instantiate the instance, and wait.

And Finally

Clouded judgement is thinking I need to upgrade to a 2TB plan (via Google or Apple) because I have stored my photos on their services and my library is more than 200 GB and I’m afraid of losing photos I value.

Clouded judgement is having a 2TB plan with Google One Drive and thinking "But if I downgrade because I’m using half a terabyte I risk losing my photos". Clear thinking, blue sky thinking, above "la soupe" thinking (to use a local expression) is having your photos locally as a files and folder structure that is easy to keep track of and migrate.

And finally, my next experiment should be with Nextcloud, to see if I can populate its DB with photos that it can see, but not edit. Ingesting via phone apps never worked properly, so now is my chance for another try.