Self-Hosting

Due to the Raspberry Pi 5, and older, having issues with heat throttling and more it makes sense to build a Photoprism on a “normal” laptop before migrating towards the Pi. The process is an interesting one.

Photo Consolidation

The First step is to consolidate your photos from Google Photos, Apple Photos, Flick and any other source you might have. The simplest method is to organise them chronologically, and then to spend time removing as many duplicates as possible. There are tools for that. They will help you add exif data back into the photo exif fields, as well as look for duplicates.

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.

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.

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. The logic is that I can use the SD card as the primary drive, and the NVMe drive as the backup drive.

For months I have been hosting Immich, Photoprism and AudioBookShelf and the experiment has been a success. It has been stable and reliable so far and I did not detect anyone accessing my server without permission.

I had these services as Exposed Host via the Swisscom router DMZ setting. it was easy to setup and run with no issues for the duration of the experiment. I closed the DMZ because no one but me was accessing these services after five to six months but me. Keeping services exposed for, me, alone, to use them, is not necessary.

Google, Apple and Microsoft have cloud storage solutions. So does Evernote, Kdrive and other products. The issue with all of these solutions is that they are owned by corporations. They are simple and convenient to use but at the cost of being locked in to an OS in some cases, and to corporate interests.

NextCloud is an open source alternative with hosting solutions that offer people with the choice of choosing between hosting solutions that are as local, or as remote as they want. I could choose between a German and a Dutch hosting solution. I chose tab.cloud simply because they offer 8gb rather than 2gb like another solution. You can upgrade to 128 gigabytes, or to a maximum of over 500 gigabytes in the paying tiers.

Until the pandemic I used Facebook (FB), Twitter(TW) and Instagram(IG) daily. As pandemic solitude took its toll on me I dumped Facebook, and then I dumped Instagram. I started blogging again, and I continued to use Twitter for another two years, before finally dumping Twitter too.

Dumping Social Media Over Time

For years I was a daily user of FB, TW and IG but as life became more solitary, and as trolling became more common, so it made sense to dump the social networks that made me suffer from Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO). When life was normal, and social, it made sense to be where all the normal people with normal lives were. It’s as my life derailed from the standard model life that you see in series, films and FB and IG that I needed to break away. I dumped the social media sites for the open web.

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Fediverse instances want you to pay them to use their services. This could be fantastic. It isn’t, for one simple reason. We are helping someone else grow their projects enough for them, eventually to get IPOs and sell off the company, and our contribution to the highest bidder for them to profit.

Zwift and Strava

I liked Zwift and I liked Strava, until they raised venture funds, getting millions, on top of what we were already paying for the service. When Strava got VC funding I stopped my subscription because shareholders now control the company, not the company, and shareholders have no vested interest in users, as demonstrated by Twitter being sold to Musk.