In an ideal world Google Photos, iCloud Photos, MyCloud (Swisscom) and other photo backup solutions would back up your photos into a directory structure that you can access and download from with ease and convenience. Unfortunately non of them want to offer that. That is why finding a workflow to get data out is worthwhile.
Remember, a cloud solution, where you can’t get media files back out, is not a backup solution.
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.
I grew up in the eighties, and 90s, and so computing, open source software and the world wide web grew up with me. In that time we went from going to magazine shops to buy mags, and cd shops to buy CDs, and book shops to buy books. We also took photos on rolls of films and then took those rolls to La Combe or the Garden Centre to have the films processed, and then we put them in albums.
For weeks I haven’t updated Google Photos because I ran out of storage on the 200 gigabyte tier and I avoid using more than 200 gigabytes of storage with Apple iCloud. If either of them had a 500 GB tier, then I’d consider them. As they do not offer this option I chose to phase them out with Immich and Kdrive.
Immich As Photo Gallery Immich replaces Google Photos, and iCloud among other apps.
Those of us that are geeky, and old enough, will remember when apps were local and we saved data to internal and external hard drives. We would take photos with a camera, or a phone, and once we got home we would download them to our computer, using apps like Picasa and iPhoto. Both apps would help us to organise them chronolgically, and eventually by location, people in photos and much more.
Over two or three years I have been playing with Immich. In that time I have exported my photos from two or three phones multiple times. The reason for me importing photos multiple times is that every so often I update immich and something breaks. It is at this point that I reimport libraries yet again.
From One Pi to Another This morning I swapped from one Pi to another because the other Pi has an NVMe drive attached to it.
Immich is an easy to install and use app that works well with the Pi5. By default you will have it run on the SD card but yesterday I finally found an NVMe drive at a reasonable price so I swapped the AI kit for a 521 NVMe drive.It was detected with ease so I formatted the hard drive. I then used GRsync to move the photos from the SD card to the NVMe drive.
Yesterday I shifted my data and setup from the Pi5 8gb to the Pi5 4gb with relative ease. I rsynched the data from one Pi to the other, brought up the docker containers, checked that they were working before shutting down the other Pi. I then swapped the 8gb Pi with the four gb pi and turned on the four gb Pi, after plugging the hard drive that I use to store photos and audiobooks and podcasts.
There are several types of people. One of them is youtubers that try and fail until they succeed, and then there are people like me, who also try and fail until they succeed. In one case the individual probably gets millions of views, and earns enough to waste hundreds of dollars per video in microtransactions, to people like me who are experimenting with Pis because it’s cheaper, once you know what you’re doing than getting a synology box.
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.