The Mature Phone Photo Backup Landscape

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Many years ago, if I took photos with a nokia phone I had to sync them via a memory card. With the arrival of the Android Nexus on and the Apple iPhone our digital photography habits changed. With time we would leave our cameras at home, and carry our mobile phones, and photograph paries and hikes with these.

In the process we had two apps to backup. Google Photos and iPhoto. Both of these were optimal for whether we were on iOS or Android. For a while this was fine because they automatically backed up to our computers. With time though, the backup was more and more cloud centric, to the point where our photos were now either on iCloud or Google Photos.

iCloud and Google One

People like me, of course, had a backup in iCloud and Google Photos. For a considerable amount of time Google Photos had a counter that increased every day so storage felt unlimited, until they decided to charge for storage. By then emmigrating from their cloud solutions was complicated by the time it would take to download the data, but also because with Google Takeout the photo data was separated from the photo files. Migrating would now be a hassle but that is a topic for another post.

Telecom Operators

Today we have a multitude of photo backup solutions. Some are provided by our telecom operator. MyCloud is provided by Swisscom for example. Infomaniak has both the kDrive app, if you want to backup with their own tool, or you can setup a Nextcloud instance that you host via their 'self-hosting' offerings.

Self-Hosting

NextCloud can also be self-hosted on a Pi, personal laptop or other but in my experience it can be fragile.

Immich and Photoprism are two interesting alternatives. Immich feels a lot like Google Photos and Photoprism is similar. Photoprism is developed in the EU.

There are other options but I mention two of the key players.

Flickr

If we think laterally then Flickr is another option. For around 8 CHF per month you can backup an unlimited amount of photos, and you can then choose to make some of them public and share them to groups.

Since this is a community of photographers, rather than influencers quality is higher, and the focus is on landscapes, urban views, people and more. This is an expensive option that fills a niche that other apps do not fill.

Google Photos and Photos

The key difference between Google Photos, Photos, on MacOS and iOS and third party options such as Kdrive, immich and others is that they usually do not run in the background automatically. with Google Photos and Photos as soon as you take a photo it is backed up. With almost every other app you need to open the app, and keep it open until uploading ends.

With Immich and Photoprism I kept the apps open, on a specific screen to backup years of photos. This could take the entire night. That's why iCloud is a good parachute, until you've backed up to third party solutions.

The Temporarily Free Trap

iCloud, Google Photos and MyCloud were all free for long enough for us to store photos with them, and when they became paying we had to choose between abandoning photos or paying for their service. That's why Immich and Kdrive are interesting options. Immich is local, and kDrive can be backed up locally with ease.

And Finally

For me the ideal setup includes Immich, Kdrive and iCloud if you're on iOS. Immich is the primary photo app, used to backup and catalogue photos. Kdrive is excellent as an offsite backup, but it also has the advantage of automatically backing up to a hard drive in my home. If I see a cheaper contract I can easily slide to that one within minutes, in theory.

Finally icloud is the parachute. As soon as photos are backed up to Immich and Kdrive they can be deleted from the phone, saving space.