How do you sync/save your photos from your mobile phone? (automatic upload/manual)?

Ympker · May 31

TL;DR: What's your approach to saving/syncing your photos from your phone to the cloud? (manual upload/automatic upload; automatic upload, then delete bad photos?..)

So, for the past 10 years I synced my photos to the unlimited photo storage of Google Photos and/or Amazon Photos. After Google Photos discontinued unlimited free storage and I cancelled Amazon Prime (which includes Photos), I moved on to making use of pCloud and Koofr (which I already have) as my primary photocloud. Now, there has something that has already been bugging me before and I just noticed it after the switch again. With the automatic photo sync enabled for pCloud/Koofr all the Photos I take on my phone get synced. I was able to de-select folders like Screenshots, DL, WhatsApp and others but often enough it's still shitty photos that get synced (e.g. I took a picture of some product in the supermarket, some blurry sideshot, or something else I'll probably never wanna see again). With the "unlimited" storage of Google and Amazon I probably just settled with "whatever", but even then I noticed how I was getting frustrated when scrolling through many bad photos in the cloud just to find that one good one to show it to a friend. That's why I was wondering: Why not do things differently, now that I moved to pCloud/Koofr. Why not manually upload photos, but this time only the good ones?
Then I thought: Hm, I'll probably have to sit down once a week/month and upload the good photos manually. Will I remember or just forget and worst case lose photos due to phone dying or being stolen while on holidays, which would result in the loss of awesome memories. Syncing to pCloud/Koofr and then deleting the bad ones doesn't seem ideal either, since at least pCloud will try to re-sync photos that I deleted online which kinda sucks. Having all photos as duplicates in pCloud/Koofr (e.g. sync automatically and have it in pCloud Sync folder, then copy good ones elsewhere) also kinda sucks.
How are you guys handling this?

havoc · May 31

Haven't yet, but have been watching discussions on it.

Best as I can tell iPhone gang in selfhosted space is going for an app called PhotoSync, which has a 6 bucks lifetime tier of some sort to enable more features. Haven't explored it yet, but that's how people are getting the photos off their device it seems

Android probably has a bit more options

As for what happens after...I'm thinking borgbackup to rsync.net and storage box

bikegremlin · May 31

I copy them to my hard drive. The ones that are worth saving that is.

tetech · May 31

NextCloud, Amazon, OneDrive, iDrive. I do it automatically, so yes it saves dud photos, but I tend to treat the cloud more as a backup than a library. Rather have duds than lose stuff in my opinion.

Ympker · May 31

@tetech said:
NextCloud, Amazon, OneDrive, iDrive. I do it automatically, so yes it saves dud photos, but I tend to treat the cloud more as a backup than a library. Rather have duds than lose stuff in my opinion.

If you treat the cloud as backup with all the dud photos, do you then have albums on your phone or another way to separate dud photos from good ones?

MichaelCee · May 31

I moved from the cloud. Had an iPhone for a couple years and used iCloud. Now with my Galaxy my goal is to sync to a local drive. I would like to make use of the cloud but the last encryption service I used seemed to have corrupted a bunch of MP4 files?

Ympker · May 31

@MichaelCee said:
I moved from the cloud. Had an iPhone for a couple years and used iCloud. Now with my Galaxy my goal is to sync to a local drive. I would like to make use of the cloud but the last encryption service I used seemed to have corrupted a bunch of MP4 files?

I use Cryptomator for encryption in the cloud. Works quite well.

MichaelCee · May 31

@Ympker said:

@MichaelCee said:
I moved from the cloud. Had an iPhone for a couple years and used iCloud. Now with my Galaxy my goal is to sync to a local drive. I would like to make use of the cloud but the last encryption service I used seemed to have corrupted a bunch of MP4 files?

I use Cryptomator for encryption in the cloud. Works quite well.

Yeah, exactly what I used. Encrypted on a Mac Mini. 3 of my video files wouldn't open. I haven't tested them since removing them from the encrypted folder, might not be the worst case scenario but it was coming up as corrupted files

Ympker · May 31

@MichaelCee said:

@Ympker said:

@MichaelCee said:
I moved from the cloud. Had an iPhone for a couple years and used iCloud. Now with my Galaxy my goal is to sync to a local drive. I would like to make use of the cloud but the last encryption service I used seemed to have corrupted a bunch of MP4 files?

I use Cryptomator for encryption in the cloud. Works quite well.

Yeah, exactly what I used. Encrypted on a Mac Mini. 3 of my video files wouldn't open. I haven't tested them since removing them from the encrypted folder, might not be the worst case scenario but it was coming up as corrupted files

Damn, that sucks. Didn't run into this issue yet, but it's always what keeps me from encrypting more things on the cloud. What IF it gets corrupted..

vyas · May 31

How many pictures + videos (per week/month) are we talking about ? The problem statement/ current approach is well defined, but there is a huge difference betwewen say, 10 images/vids a week versus 300 a month...(or higher) with WA images/vids being the biggest culprit*..

I recently had to manually go through over 15,000 images and videos for that ONE image the Mrs wanted…since well formatted, renamed, encrypted backup was corrupted

p.s: my iDrive mobile backup works as primary dump for all media, koofr for select media

*All those Good Morning! Messages with flowers...
(auto download is disabled btw, so no more a problem for years)

MichaelCee · May 31

@vyas said:
*All those Good Morning! Messages with flowers...
(auto download is disabled btw, so no more a problem for years)

I think that is definitely a cultural thing😅 Or an age thing😂

bdl · May 31

https://www.photosync-app.com/home with multiple targets works great on Android and iOS and if you install on your desktop you can also set that as a backup target too

thagoat · June 1

Using Immich for the last year and a half. With a backup of the Immich docker folder to a Hetzner storage box. chef's kiss

tetech · June 1

@Ympker said:

@tetech said:
NextCloud, Amazon, OneDrive, iDrive. I do it automatically, so yes it saves dud photos, but I tend to treat the cloud more as a backup than a library. Rather have duds than lose stuff in my opinion.

If you treat the cloud as backup with all the dud photos, do you then have albums on your phone or another way to separate dud photos from good ones?

I delete the dud photos from phone. I don't care whether they get deleted from cloud or not. I could do an rclone to remove the dud ones from the cloud I suppose, but in real life I don't bother.

I do sometimes put photos into albums, but in general I find I store them by date anyway. Probably AI will tag stuff for me in the future.

Amadex · June 1

google photos & immich

cpsd · June 1

I still pay for Amazon (the 100GB video plan) to avoid thinking about this. I have videos disabled and prefer to have all the photos uploaded.

Ympker · June 1

@vyas said:
How many pictures + videos (per week/month) are we talking about ? The problem statement/ current approach is well defined, but there is a huge difference betwewen say, 10 images/vids a week versus 300 a month...(or higher) with WA images/vids being the biggest culprit*..

I recently had to manually go through over 15,000 images and videos for that ONE image the Mrs wanted…since well formatted, renamed, encrypted backup was corrupted

p.s: my iDrive mobile backup works as primary dump for all media, koofr for select media

*All those Good Morning! Messages with flowers...
(auto download is disabled btw, so no more a problem for years)

Just checked, it's roughly 40-60 images per month (no wa images included as I just backup camera roll/DCIM). Damn, corrupted backups suck

Interesting messages with flowers😂🧐

akhfa · June 1

@bdl said:
https://www.photosync-app.com/home with multiple targets works great on Android and iOS and if you install on your desktop you can also set that as a backup target too

Can you use it to upload to s3? I see in the website and it should has that capability, but S3 is not exist in the "plugin" description in playstore

mfs · June 1

Nextcloud (self hosted) w/ MinIO storage (self hosted)
The Nextcloud app tends to upload pretty much as soon as I take the photo

I've been tinkering w/ ente.io (self-hosted) but it is one of a thousand projects halfway down my to-do list

bdl · June 1

@akhfa said:

@bdl said:
https://www.photosync-app.com/home with multiple targets works great on Android and iOS and if you install on your desktop you can also set that as a backup target too

Can you use it to upload to s3? I see in the website and it should has that capability, but S3 is not exist in the "plugin" description in playstore

Yes just checked, it's listed as a target on the iOS (with paid premium upgrade) however I cannot see it on my premium bundle Android install.

I backup to my NAS using photosync then upload to S3 using Duplicacy from that.

ios info: https://www.photosync-app.com/support/cloud/answers/how-to-transfer-photos-to-amazon-s3

The developer is really great with communication so if you had any questions re: S3 on Android, try emailing him and seeing what he recommends. https://www.photosync-app.com/contact

root · June 2

I use a Raspberry Pi 3B+ with a MicroSD Endurance on my WiFi running DietPi. Every day, at 23:00, my phone uploads photos on it over SFTP using FolderSync app for Android. Once every few months (when I remember and have time), I download all late photos from the Raspberry Pi onto external HDDs and filter them manually.

Every 2 years I encrypt this data onto a separate HDD, and upload it into cloud encrypted. I use Koofr as cloud solution, and Cryptomator as encryption. [I do this every 2 years because I have just 1 MB/s upload speed in Ireland.]

SocksAreComfortable · June 2

I use the Sync apps by MetaCtrl. Many years ago (2012 ish, don't remember exactly) I used Dropbox for my cloud backup and found their DropSync app. In 2019-2020 or so I swapped to using OneDrive, and hey, turns out they make a OneSync as well. I think they have apps for most of the major syncing services, plus one that does FTP, SMB, etc. The apps have been extremely reliable and straightforward to use, which is very nice for something like this (https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=MetaCtrl&hl=en-US).

My workflow is this: take pictures/videos. I have the Sync app configured to do two-way sync whenever the phone is charging, regardless of network type. You can also trigger a manual sync whenever. I have a folder in my OneDrive called DCIM Sync that it syncs to, and on my computer every once in a while, I will go through that folder and organize things (move the photos I want to my NAS, delete the ones I don't need, etc.). Those organizations then get synced back to my phone, so my camera roll is basically a mirror image of the DCIM Sync folder in my OneDrive).

imok · June 2

I use Google Photos, it's awesome.

But I want to move to Immich because I don't want to depend on the cloud. I've heard good things about it.

Amadex · June 2

@imok said:
I use Google Photos, it's awesome.

But I want to move to Immich because I don't want to depend on the cloud. I've heard good things about it.

Have you machine for that adventure?

silicomnet · June 2

onedrive + icloud + nextcloud

Ympker · June 2

@SocksAreComfortable said:
I use the Sync apps by MetaCtrl. Many years ago (2012 ish, don't remember exactly) I used Dropbox for my cloud backup and found their DropSync app. In 2019-2020 or so I swapped to using OneDrive, and hey, turns out they make a OneSync as well. I think they have apps for most of the major syncing services, plus one that does FTP, SMB, etc. The apps have been extremely reliable and straightforward to use, which is very nice for something like this (https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=MetaCtrl&hl=en-US).

My workflow is this: take pictures/videos. I have the Sync app configured to do two-way sync whenever the phone is charging, regardless of network type. You can also trigger a manual sync whenever. I have a folder in my OneDrive called DCIM Sync that it syncs to, and on my computer every once in a while, I will go through that folder and organize things (move the photos I want to my NAS, delete the ones I don't need, etc.). Those organizations then get synced back to my phone, so my camera roll is basically a mirror image of the DCIM Sync folder in my OneDrive).

That sounds like a good approach. I also thought about organising photos into albums after syncing to pcloud. Will just have to find out whether pcloud mobile client then will try to re-upload everything, because file is missing if I move it to another folder. That said, pcloud mobile client also allows to retain dcim path. Since I have sync enabled only when using wifi, I could also create albums in my dcim folder on my phone which would then be synced

vyas · June 2

@Amadex said:

@imok said:
I use Google Photos, it's awesome.

But I want to move to Immich because I don't want to depend on the cloud. I've heard good things about it.

Have you machine for that adventure?

Good point, might aso explain why imok is waiting for that 1200 gb storage vps

ialexpw · June 2

@thagoat said:
Using Immich for the last year and a half. With a backup of the Immich docker folder to a Hetzner storage box. chef's kiss

Pretty similar - I self-host immich on a mini PC at home and then backup the docker folder to Koofr via Restic. Been great so far.

SocksAreComfortable · June 2

@ialexpw said:

@thagoat said:
Using Immich for the last year and a half. With a backup of the Immich docker folder to a Hetzner storage box. chef's kiss

Pretty similar - I self-host immich on a mini PC at home and then backup the docker folder to Koofr via Restic. Been great so far.

Yeah I'm really looking forward to Immich going stable -- too much of a chicken to set it up beforehand, lol, but will 100% be using it as my main backup/photo organizer after the stable release.

MGarbis · June 3

FolderSync pro + Hetzner storage box
I'm not a very active photographer, so there aren't many pictures.

ialexpw · June 3

@SocksAreComfortable said:

@ialexpw said:

@thagoat said:
Using Immich for the last year and a half. With a backup of the Immich docker folder to a Hetzner storage box. chef's kiss

Pretty similar - I self-host immich on a mini PC at home and then backup the docker folder to Koofr via Restic. Been great so far.

Yeah I'm really looking forward to Immich going stable -- too much of a chicken to set it up beforehand, lol, but will 100% be using it as my main backup/photo organizer after the stable release.

It's been pretty good so far! I was in the same boat, but as all the media is under a folder it's fairly easy to backup/take copies of it when needed. I was using Ente before, but liking Immich so far.

How do you sync/save your photos from your mobile phone? (automatic upload/manual)?

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