Downgrading Icloud from 200 GB to 50 GB
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Downgrading Icloud from 200 GB to 50 GB

Byrichard

If there was the option to downgrade from 200GB to 100 GB I would have taken it as I needed 51.6 gigabytes to backup my phone and other data. Since I couldn’t I went through and removed my photo backup as well as back ups of folders that don’t need to be backed up because they are cloud serice in the first place. Imagine the rational of backing up backups. It makes sense, but without exageration.

I am able to downgrade because I have Immich, Kdrive, Photoprism and Nextcloud backing up my photos as well as two to three hard drives. The beauty of this solution is that I go from spending 36 CHF per year for iCloud down to 10 CHF per year. I go from spending 100 CHF per year down to about 35 CHF per year, and I go from being obliged to be loyal to cloud providers because I had no local backup of everything, to being free to jump from service to service on a whim. By whim I mean that I can dump a service as soon as a cheaper option appears.

There are two reasons for me dumping iCloud. The first is that they’re more expensive than all other solutions so to use them is to throw away money. The second reason, and the more damning one is that if you store photos on iCloud once you reach a certain library size you’re trapped.

You’re trapped because although you can create several libraries on external drives you can only download photos from the cloud on the system drive, not others. This means that with a 500 GB laptop drive that is full with files you’re trapped within iCloud. Your data is locked in until you get a mac mini, add a two terabyte drive, and download all your files.

In the end I used Immich, Photoprism and Kdrive to backup the data that was trapped in the cloud before removing photo sync from the phone with iCloud, relying on Immich, Photoprism, Nextcloud and Kdrive. Why so many services you may ask. Experimentation, and redundancy. Immich is in very active development so they recommend not to rely on it. Photoprism seems stable. Nextcloud is good too, but it’s better for backing up files from computers and more. Kdrive is the offsite backup.

And Finally

Now that Nextcloud takes care of synching files between devices and Immich, Kdrive and other solutions take care of backing up photos and videos there is less pressure for me to use cloud services such as iCloud. I keep the 50GB plan because I can still backup my phone in the cloud as well as various app data. If it was not for these constraints I could dump iCloud entirely. The biggest storage hog on iCloud is the phone’s backup.

Cloud Storage Tiers

Cloud Storage Tiers

Byrichard

On the 17th of February I will stop using Google One Drive and I was looking at the smaller tiers. You have 15 gigabytes for free, 100, and 200 gigabyte options, and then 200 gigabytes. At the moment I have 200 GB on Google Drive for documents and three hundred GB for photos. All of those photos are now backed up with Immich, PhotoPrism, and possibly one or two other storage solutions.

The Chasm From 200 GB to 2 TB

The issue that I, and others, come accross is that there is a massive leap from storing 100GB, 200GB or 2TB. There are no 500, 750 or 1TB tiers. You go from three francs per month to 10 CHF per month. I’ve had Google One with 2TB of space and used no more than 800 GB except for a day or two when I backed up my photos to Google Drive while migrating them off Google Photos.

Infomaniak is Cheaper, Microsoft 365 Offers A Better Tier

It turns out that Infomaniak’s Kdrive and Microsoft 365 Personal are two of the best options available. They’re priced with a 2 CHF difference. 67 CHF and 69 CHF per year. One offers Office Suite, as well as one terabyte of storage to use as you like, and the other offers two terabytes to use as you see fit. Both make it easy to backup photos from your phone to the cloud, and from the cloud to your laptop or external hard drive.

Self Hosted Replacements

As I mentioned above Google Photos has been duplicated via PhotoPrism, Immich and to some degree kDrive so I can delete those photos without concern, in theory. Google Drive is backed up to Kdrive so in theory I can delete that dat from Google Drive safely.

No Perfect Tier

My reason for moving away from Google is not based on conspiracy theories, or a moral problem with Google. It’s based on financial considerations. if they had a 500 GB or one terabyte tier then I would just downgrade my account for that tier size. This option does not exist so rather than downscale I might just jump ship.

Crowded Environment

The online backup market is huge. You have the choice between self-hosted solutions and cloud hosting solutions. Their pricing is quite similar but the question is whether you want your data to be in Europe, the US, or your own home, or the home of a friend or family member.

  • Google One – Google/Alphabet
  • iCloud – Apple
  • kDrive – Infomaniak
  • myCloud – Swisscom
  • OwnCloud
  • flickr – hosted
  • nextCloud – self hosted or hosted
  • PhotoPrism – self hosted or hosted
  • Immich – self hosted or hosted
  • Mylio – self-hosted or cloud hosted, although once you pay to backup to an exteran drive you have both

And Finally

I was happy to use Google One, Google Drive and Google Photos for years. The reason for which I decided to leave their service is that I saw the same experience, but for cheaper from Infomaniak. It has the added benefit that the data is stored closer to where I am. It’s nice to support local providers when the option exists.

Now that I have a local backup of my photographs, rather than depending on cloud services I can shop around and switch from the current cheapest to the next most affordable. I only need to check once per year, when the current contract is about to be renewed.

Experimenting with the Photoprism App

Experimenting with the Photoprism App

Byrichard

While playing with Nextcloud I found a serious flaw. If you add images via the command line from one directory to another, and then delete them, then their ghosts remain in the timeline. By ghosts I mean references to these files in the CMS and there is no quick way of removing them. You need to remove them individually and that’s time consuming. That’s why, when I was trying to find a solution I came across Photoprism.

Photoprism is a photo management app like Lightroom, Google Photos, iPhoto and plenty of other app. It is open source and can be installed quite easily using this Raspberry Pi Solution. With less trial and error than with Nextcloud I was able to get it up and running within an hour or so.

My first try was wwith a slow 16gb card but that took ages so I thought that I would set another card, this time with 512 gigabytes of storage going overnight. In the time it took me to heat dinner the card was ready for me to experiment with and my first impressions were good.

I tried to upload a few images from a PC, and then from the mobile phone via a web browser before playing with Photosync.The beauty of Photosync is that it will upload even when the phone is sleeping, or another app is open. I let it synchronise photos while I slept, and as I went shopping for bread for a Fondue later today. The moment it seemed to lose momentum is when I got back to the parking after shopping. That’s where I lose the mobile phone signal. As I wrote this, after fourteen or so hours of working almost non stop the files were synced between the phone and Raspberry Pi 4 2gb. They recommend using a Raspberry Pi 4gb or higher but for the sake of tests it seems okay with a lower spec machine.

Indexing

With this app you need to tell it to index photographs. This doesn’t happen automatically.

It can recognise people, create labels/keywords for images, moments, places and more. It also gives you a log of everything it’s doing, from indexing photos to adding locations, to adding keywords, to asking you to name faces that it recognises. Remember that this sits on your personal device, and does not need to ever touch the cloud, if you do not want it to.

Another feature that this app has is to detect and flag low quality and low resolution images and this can be a very good feature to have. Sometimes you get junk images from old websites or other directories. This makes it quick to get rid of them.

When Photoprism indexes photos it creates a seperate file with the new file names, creates thumbnails of various sizes and then when it completes its task, or when you stop indexing, it then merges the old index with the new index.

You have the option of a “complete rescan” which reindexes everything or you can choose to “cleanup” which deletes orphaned index entries, sidecar files and thumbnails. It’s because Nextcloud doesn’t have an intuitive way of re-indexing files that no longer exist that I was tempted to try this piece of software.

If I was to change two things with indexing then I would add a status indicator to tell me how many images remain without an index. It runs fine in the background but it would be nice to know how many images remain. I saw that someone else said that they wish indexing would run automaticall, until all images are indexed, and then again when new images are added.

EXIF Data

The app allows you to see image exif data, for example latitude and Longitude but also a title based on the location, iso, exposure, camera used, lens, f-stop, focal length, copyright, subject, description and keywords.

For key wording it uses colours, location, keywords in the local language, such as “Lac”, “rue”, state, country and more. You can add notes and click done if you change anything.

Humour

It has labelled a cat as a dog, human climbers as lizards, a sign for road works as a monument the LHC tunnels as wood.

Filtering

You can filter photos by countries, cameras, newest, month, category, colour, year and more. This makes searching for images quick and intuitive. I also like that it automatically keywords images with the most obvious tags. This allows the human being who is sorting these images to add specific tags, such as people involved, event keywords and more.

Video and Photos

With Nextcloud when you upload videos it doesn’t recognise them immediately so you get a grey box. With Photoprism you see a keyframe and you can then watch the videos within seconds so this tool can be used for photographs and video.

Downsides

Unless you pay 2 USD per month you only have one user, so you can’t have admin as just the admin, and use your own name as a user. This is sub-optimal for security but also for family sharing.

Photosync is also not free. It wants you to pay 6 CHF for the app, and encourages you to pay for Photosync Premium.

If you pay for the bonus features you will pay 6 CHF for the app, 25 CHF for lifetime Premium, and another 2 CHF per month for the right to create more users on your own system.

Google Photo is 100 CHF per year. iCloud is 120 CHF per year. Lightroom is 10 CHF per year to 55 CHF per year.

A few years ago I used Kyno by LessPain Sotware and that is 159 USD per year.

It’s cheap compared to the competition and by using it you’re supporting a European product, rather than American.

And Finally

Whilst Nextcloud is great for file sharing, time tracking, tasks, news reading and more Photoprism is great for managing photographs. It is quick and easy to install on a Pi. You find the URL, you tell Etcher to burn it to an SD card, you put the SD card into a Raspberry Pi and within minutes with a fast card, you can connect either by SSH or by web interface. Within minutes you can be using the Raspberry Pi as a photo management tool locally.

If you install tailscale and Photosync you can be backing up your mobile device images within a matter of minutes and it remembers what has been synchronised, whether you use the local IP address or the tailscail VPN one. When you’re synchronising thousands of files you want a solution that remembers what you have synched.

I was so convinced by Photoprism that I considered replacing Nextcloud with it in the 8gb Raspberry Pi, but chose not to, for now, because Nextcloud has time tracking options that I want to experiment with, for now.

A Simple iPhone – iCloud solution

A Simple iPhone – iCloud solution

Byrichard

A few years ago I bought a 256 gigabyte iphone because I wanted more space and for a long time it was great because it meant that I had plenty of room to grow into. The issue comes when you get to over 200 gigabytes of data stored in iCloud because you go from 3 CHF per month to 10 CHF per month. You go from 36 CHF per year to 120 CHF per year. That is a big increase.


I wouldn’t mind paying this much, if it was easier to retrieve this data. Once data is on iCloud and plenty of services it is a nuissance to retrieve. If you think “I can expand it for a few weeks then you’re right, you can. It’s when you want to recover the data that you will get blocked. iCloud doesn’t allow a photo library to be spread across multiple drives, so either you have everything on a single volume, or you’re trapped paying for decades to come.


Now for the simple solution I hadn’t considered until last night. A lower capacity iPhone. With a 256 gigabyte phone you need ten terabytes of storage to backup the entire phone, but with a 126 gigabyte phone you sneak under the 200 gigabyte limit with ease. The cost of a new phone is relatively high, but consider that you’re saving 81 CHF per year, and several hundred francs on a mobile phone.


Next time you consider an iPhone consider the size of the phone compared to your laptop hard drive, as well as the cost of cloud storage and backup. The bigger the phone, the larger the yearly tax. Keep it to 200 gigabytes and the tax is 39 CHF per year, expand it to two terabytes and it’s 120 CHF per year. Retrieving the data is not straight forward. I will stick to smaller capacity phones, to avoid hitting the 200 gigabyte limit in future.