Immich and iPhone Storage

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When experimenting with the Immich iPhone app I found it impossible to upload beyond 15,000 images and I supposed that it was because the phone timed out before it had checked all the previous files before moving on to the last four thousand images. In reality the problem is that Immich downloads the media from iCloud and leaves it on the phone. The result is that if you have one hundred gigabytes of photos on iCloud you need one hundred gigabytes of storage ony your phone.

I only came across this after several attempts. I realised that it was a storage issue because another app said “Phone memory is low, please clear some data, or something to this effect. As this is my old phone I could clear files from other apps to make sense for iCloud to download the last of my photos, to be synced with Immich.

A few hours later I had downloaded and synced all iCloud photos to Immich. I can now delete iCloud images and have plenty of space for future growth. I have the 200 gigabyte plan so it doesn’t really matter.

## iCloud and iPhones

My second to last phone as an iPhone 8 plus with 256 gigabytes of ram but the next one was an iPhone SE 2 with 128 gigs of ram. The reason for the downgrade in storage is simple. Two hundred gigabytes with Apple costs 3 CHF per month whereas 2 terabytes is 10 CHF per month. The cost per gigabyte makes the 2 terabyte plan more interesting but the difficulty of retrieving data makes the plan uninteresting. You end up paying 120 CHF per year until you find a way to retrieve that data.

## The Shift from Self-Storage to Online Storage

Many years ago Google had Picasa, and Apple had and still have iPhoto. Both apps expected you to store your files locally. With time, as people shifted to laptops so the amount of storage available on devices declined. That’s why Picasa enabled cloud storage, and why Google Photos and iPhotos allow you to backup to the cloud and clear space on mobile devices. With android devices it’s easy to add a miniSD card up to two terabytes. With iOS, but also with MacOS devices getting more storage costs hundreds of francs more.

With Apple you pay 1 CHF per month for 50GB, 3 CHF per month for 200GB, 10 CHF for 2TB, 30 CHF for 6TH and 60CHF for 12TB. By dumping my photos from iCloud to Immich I can downgrade my iCloud plan from 200GB for 3CHF per month to 50 GB for a symbolic franc per month.

iCloud Photos use 135 gigabytes of storage out of 185 gigabytes of storage.

## Local Storage and Cloud Storage

If you have one hundred and fourty gigabytes of photos then you need a phone with at least 140 gigabytes of storage but the SE has just 128 gigabytes of storage. The laptop has about 256 gigabytes if I remember correctly.

This means that if you store two terabytes of photos in the cloud you need a two terabyte drive to recover them, whether on your phone or your laptop. Since this costs thousands of francs it makes more sense to have a solution such as Immich, Nextcloud and photosync and Photoprism.

I believe that both Nextcloud and Photosync download photos from iCloud, upload them to their respective services and remove them, whereas Immich downloads them and keeps them in place. With Immich you need to have enough storage on your mobile phone whereas the others adapt.

## And Finally

Immich did not give an error message. It just got stuck so I tried over and over without success. It’s because another app said that I had run out of space that I was able to resolve the issue and accomplish my goal of transferring files from iPhoto/iCloud to Immich.

Now is the time to evaluate Nextcloud Immich, and Photoprism over a number of days.