Ditch Google Photos and embrace Immich: Here's why there is so much hype around hosting your own photo backup solution

[Redaktion]

Whether its questionable privacy practices, incorrectly categorising images as child pornography, or using your data for its AI training models, storing your photos with Google continues to be a privacy nightmare. Thankfully a self hosted solution is making waves in the community, and for good reason.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Ditch-Google-Photos-and-embrace-Immich-Here-s-why-there-is-so-much-hype-around-hosting-your-own-photo-backup-solution.833862.0.html

[Patrick Coombe]

I've been saying for years now that cloud backup of your personal memories is not smart, they do not have your best interest in mind they just want that $2/$20/$200 a month from your family.

Most aren't lucky enough to diy their own backup but some edge product will come around soon that hands data back to the people and we change the hard drives once per year like smoke alarm batteries.

[Neenyah]

Your own backup is always superior, no doubts about that, but Google Photos is excellent to simply compress photos and videos without any significant loss of quality, then download those now-much-lighter files and back them up offline.

[Timothy Garrett]

Right now, my Android-centric workflow uses Google Photos for collection, editing and sharing of images (I've long ago given up on its content-sensitive facial recognition features), followed by downloading / offloading and sorting everything into appropriate folders in Google Drive.
The problem is the sheer effort involved in those latter steps! I'm overwhelmed with the quantity of files and having to manually group them into "Event1", "Event2", etc. And Google Photos is SLOW.
Moving back to something NAS-based as described here not only makes great sense, it puts the biggest chunk of my workflow into the local CPU space rather than cloud-based. Less fear of losing stuff.
Of course, one can always use a background utility like Synology Cloud Backup to send the finished collection back into the cloud for extra safekeeping.

[indy]

So trust the small, never heard of company over one I am pretty confident will be around in some format for 20+ years?

I pay $20/year for my storage, have never had an issue with it, and it's shareable (both photos, and storage(5 people)). If I expand that storage, it's $30 a year. After that, it gets **cheaper** per byte.

A system like this article shows is easily $1000+, and who knows how long it'll last?

Thank you for your perspective.

[vertigo]

some edge product will come around soon that hands data back to the people and we change the hard drives once per year like smoke alarm batteries.

I hope you don't change your smoke alarm batteries annually. And why would you change hard drive annually? That would be both expensive and an increased risk. If a drive makes it past the first few months, and especially the first year, it's much better to keep it at least 4-5 years if the capacity is enough.

Google Photos is excellent to simply compress photos and videos without any significant loss of quality, then download those now-much-lighter files and back them up offline.

You could do this very easily on your own without using the bandwidth to upload and download the photos and without giving Google access to them. Though unless you take *a lot* of photos/videos, hard drive space is cheap enough there's really no reason to do this at all.

So trust the small, never heard of company over one I am pretty confident will be around in some format for 20+ years?

A system like this article shows is easily $1000+, and who knows how long it'll last?

You're not trusting the company if it's self-hosted. It's like using Owncloud/Nextcloud/Seafile instead of Google Drive. And the cost is dependent on how you set it up. If you buy a NAS just for this, yeah, it'll be hundreds, but not $1k+ (though I can't speak for different countries/markets). And to buy a NAS for just this wouldn't make much sense; either you'd buy one and use it for other stuff as well, or you could build a small, cheap one for *maybe* ~$250, or you could just run it off a computer you already have. Or use a VPS. Lots of options, none of which would cost that much and some that would be quite cheap. Sure, at the prices you're paying, it would probably take 10+ years to balance out, but it's not just the cost, it's the fact you're paying such low prices because you and your data are the real product. Those prices are subsidized because of that. If you don't care about that, that's fine, but this product and this article are meant for those that do, and want an alternative and are willing to pay more for that.

[turtle]

I've been using immich now for about a month. The final nail in the coffin was my wife's email telling her she was at 99Gh of 100Gb of storage and if she didn't upgrade she would no longer receive incoming email. WTF Google? We run out entire life by our email! Bank accounts, kids sports events, school information and notification, work stuff. The fact that our email storage is tied to Google photos storage and the Google photos app encourages you to not worry about storage is very alarming. Videos of the kids hockey, birthdays, family events all take up space quickly. We have so many photos and videos in Google's cloud that upgrading storage would easily be an additional $100-$150 A MONTH... Yes, really because we have nearly 14 Tb of videos and photos backed up. I am NOT giving Google $150 every month where a 14 Tb external drive is $260 ONE TIME. I have plenty of old computers I can run Linux on and set Immich to run on.
Email storage should not be tied to photo and video storage - Google knows doing so will put you in a compromising position quickly.
I set docker up on my Windows 11 machine and was new to the entire concept of docker (still am and don't fully understand it yet). I found the immich group on Discord and someone there held my hand on getting immich installed. Afterwards I set up a dynamic DNS hosting service with DynDNS that would keep my home IP address known to a domain name I picked - that way the Immich app on our phones would always update and save photos to the home server no matter where in the world we were. (last ame.dyndns.org is what is set in immich for us. My Windows machine has an app from DynDNS that updates this domain with our IPaddress at all times, so if it changes, the server can still be found over the Internet.
I plan on moving this storage installation of Immich to a headless (no monitor) ubuntu Linux installation on an old computer we no longer need in my basement. Working on that now. But having my own 14 Tb drive at home save me $150 a month (or more, because both my wife and I as well as our kids need to back up photos and videos) is nothing short of amazingly awesome.
Everything runs fast and smooth. I can still face id people in the search and can even tell the search to show me all photos with a "dog" or even "dog in a chair" and NONE of those requests or processing ever touches any server belonging to anyone but me.
That 14 Tb drive by the way? I back it up every week to a physically disconnected OFFLINE 2nd duplicate drive... and in the future, a third duplicate offline as well... because hard drives do die, but also because RANSOMWARE.
We are NEVER going back to cloud storage. Pricing changes and potential interference and intrusion by government agencies is ridiculous.
Also even if Immich (or now mother company Futo) ceased to exist tomorrow as a company this software would continue to run just the same as it is right now - which is so smooth and super fast. The software is independent from their company. It does not rely on ANY resources or cloud based features from them.
So in conclusion - F**k you Google.

[GeorgeS]

Forgetting for the moment that most all "important" images we've collected were posted on whatever "social media" site we like long ago...

the entire idea/concept that the almost countless crappy "snapshot" images we've collected with our cell phones require a self imposed "tax" (storage fee) or "cloud" is comical at best.

ALL cell phones (ether iPhone or Android) can connect to LOCAL storage and as such can be off loaded of all the content they have collected.

Many (if not MOST) home "Wireless Router" come with a USB port where a Thumb (or anything with a USB cable) can be attached and provide inexpensive storage for anyone who has your wireless lan password.


sheeze...

[mdongwe]

ALL cell phones (ether iPhone or Android) can connect to LOCAL storage and as such can be off loaded of all the content they have collected.

The point is to be able to access photos everywhere on any device.