{"id":59199,"date":"2026-11-02T13:04:13","date_gmt":"2026-11-02T11:04:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/?p=59199"},"modified":"2026-11-02T13:04:30","modified_gmt":"2026-11-02T11:04:30","slug":"on-backing-up-photo-library-folders-rather-than-photos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/on-backing-up-photo-library-folders-rather-than-photos\/","title":{"rendered":"On Backing Up Photo Library Folders Rather than Photos"},"content":{"rendered":"Reading Time: <\/span> 2<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>\n

For years, or even decades many of us backed photos up using Picasa, Flickr, iPhoto and other apps. We’d download photos from cameras and import them to these photo apps and we’d have a local library of all of our photos. With time our libraries grew so we backed up to the cloud and as our needs increased, so they offered more space for our photos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eventually they decided that they had trained their models sufficiently to start charging us for using their storage. In the process, because we had gigabytes of data it became hard to recover photos from the cloud so we were trapped. We had to pay more and more each year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With iCloud if you want to backup your photo library from the cloud you need to take two steps. The first is that you need to migrate your library to a volume that is large enough, and then you need to wait for hours, days or even weeks for everything to be downloaded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With Google Photos you can request your photo library and you can download it but this takes a big effort. First you need to download all the files, but then you need to reconcile the metadata from one file with the photo file itself, and this takes many hours, and is made simpler with the help of AI. Without AI this nightmare would be far more time consuming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yesterday I wrote about how Immich seems stable, for now. When photoprism was stable I was importing photos via photoprism and I was using a shell script to backup my photos to one drive, which I then sync to kDrive by Infomaniak.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The concept is simple- I take photos. kDrive automatically backs them up to the cloud. I also run Immich to backup photos in a media asset management system to make finding and browsing photos easy and fast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I turned off photo synching via Apple’s cloud and I still back up to Flickr, and Google Photos. With Google Photos it is just low res versions. With Flickr it is because my plan hasn’t run out yet so I can continue using it as a tertiary backup.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead of storing your photos as photos, you can store them as folders and files. If one provider raises their price, and another offers a cheaper deal, then within minutes you can switch to the cheaper provider without having to download a photo library, and then re-upload it. You’re storing the photos as data, rather than a photo library, and moving files is easier than app specific photo libraries by iCloud and Google Drive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you take a little time, to get photos to be organised in folders, by year, month and day, then you can easily move from one remote backup solution to another with ease.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading Time: <\/span> 2<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>For years, or even decades many of us backed photos up using Picasa, Flickr, iPhoto and other apps. We’d download photos from cameras and import them to these photo apps and we’d have a local library of all of our photos. With time our libraries grew so we backed up to the cloud and as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8542,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"federated","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[255],"tags":[783,351,4926,6279,6105,799],"class_list":["post-59199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-swiss-walks","tag-apple","tag-google","tag-icloud","tag-immich","tag-photos","tag-picasa"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59199"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59204,"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59199\/revisions\/59204"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}