Not sure if this is the right place but lets give it a go.
We have a family account on iCloud so all iPhones (5 of them) can sync items on the phones to their laptops and so forth. One feature that is eating all the storage space we have on iCloud and that would be Photo’s. We ran out of space and thus Backups, Photos, Contacts, etc. will not sync anymore. We can add more space in iCloud but I am not keen on keeping buying storage space with Apple.
So my thought was to have all Photo’s older then xyz days/months/years stored somewhere else to free up space in that iCloud account. I do not want to delete these older photo’s, just have them stored somewhere else but still accessible. So ideally I would be able to tell some app/solution to move photo’s from a phone to something self hosted and the user of that phone can then keep seeing the photo’s in either the Photos app or the app related to the self hosted solution.
Honestly, even more ideal would be to ‘tell’ the Photos app from Apple to use the self hosted storage and not the iCloud storage. This would make the transition transparent to all the family members. Some features might no longer work (that ‘memories’ feature perhaps?) but that is OK, being able to store photo’s is more important.
Apologies if this has been asked before but my searching, which is admittedly is not that great from my side, found no answer I could translate to my issue. Any help is appreciated!
FYI, I am running Docker at home and can make services available on the internet with ngnix in front of it as proxy. I can also run a new service of course, the self hosting bit as it were.
Take a look at immich!
Does a lot of what you stated above. Plus, it has machine learning built in so you can use features like ‘memories’ and face detection, etc. I transitioned from Google photos to immich a little less than a year ago and haven’t looked back!
Nice, seems viable!
Does immich also take care of taking the pictures from iCloud and then remove them?
This isn’t necessarily a 1:1 answer for you but it’s just what I have experience with: I used Nextcloud for a period of time and set up the app to upload which worked like any basic cloud storage service but what I’ve done since (I downsized) is just use the PhotoSync app and it’s companion on my PC. You can target a PC (like I do), WebDAV, FTP, SMB, etc. which may help with scalability.
I was considering nextcloud but was not sure if it would fit my needs, hence I asked the people here as I have seen a lot of people talk about nextcloud so I wanted to see if their experiences fit my needs.
Is nextcloud taking the pictures from iCloud and then delete them or dou you need to instruct nextcloud to do this or do you need to do that part manually?
ente is pretty great.
This is an interesting one. Seems this one has has the backend and frontend covered. Does ente take the photos from iCloud and then remove them to free up space on iCloud?
Immich. Its awesome.
Thanks, this could be a real contender in my search!
ICloudpd to get the photos from the cloud.
Photosync app to sync photos to a share. This app is awesome. I think to sync full photos it’s a one time 5$ payment. I’ve synced 70,000 photos and videos so I know it’s worth it.
Oh, nice combo of tools. May actually be a better approach than Resilio or Syncthing.
Does this chain need another service to make the photos ‘usable’ for all the family members? I am not seeking just a safe place to store photos I will delete from iCloud, these photos are (ideally) also still available to view on the phones of all family members.
Going from memory, I think the app Immich is often talked about as a server for your own photos. I haven’t tried it yet.
Syncthing.
Möbius on iOS, Syncthing on Mac/Linux, SyncTrayzor on Windows, Syncthing-Fork on Android.
Alternatively Resilio Sync.
I do find Resilio works better for iOS - it handles photos better due to iOS restrictions.
Thanks for the suggestions! Like you said in another reply, there does seem to be other options that might be simpler. But still, good to know these tools you mention!
icloudpd can be run in a container or just your host machine. It’s a little finnicky to get logins set up (and honestly I haven’t done it in a few months), but once that is working you can automate a job to pull down a backup every day/week/month and delete files from icloud.
Thanks, I will take a look!
Am I right in thinking this will get you the photos but it is up to you to place them somewhere and put a service/app in front of that storage to make it usable? Usable as is; the family members can all access their own photos and view them as if it was on the Photos app from Apple?
