I’m considering setting up a NAS to backup my stuff and replace Google Photos. Currently I’m looking at Asustor AS6704T and Synology DS923+, with the former having more powerful hardware and hardware encoding, and the latter having a better first party software experience.
Some quick comparisons show me that Synology Photos is infinitely better than Asustor Photo Gallery. AI face recognition, content tagging, and reverse Geocoding are features I’ve gotten used to in Google photos, which Synology has and Asustor doesn’t.
I’m also aware of but not really familiar with other photo backup/management solutions, namely Immich, Photoprism, Piwigo, and Lychee. Immich would probably fit me the best, but Piwigo with plugins would support Photosphere photos that I occasionally take with my Pixel.
So I guess I’m asking you guys what your preferred photo backup solution is? I probably should mention that I personally take photos with a Pixel (jpg and MP4 files), but my family uses iPhones (heic and mov files). No RAW photos for now, but for those who do and would edit photos, how would you manage them?
Immich is rapidly growing into the closest solution for replacing google photos. It’s not fully there yet, but there is very active development going on and it’s advancing quickly.
Wow, you’re not kidding. Looks like they’re going for an close copy of the UI:
Will be great to see how this progresses.
I’m using Synology, it’s good enough but I don’t like that the software is not Free Software. In the long run I will probably need to build something from scratch manually.
But if you’re using Synology Photos then I wrote some scripts for it https://github.com/jeena/synology-pictures one which randomly finds pictures of family members and puts them into a place where another script (Home Assistant) then shows them on the TV if nobody is watching anything.
And another one which does this “Today, X years ago” also for family members and pushes it into our Matrix family chat.
I’ve struggled with trying to find an alternative to Google Photos that actually works well enough, and reliably enough, for me to feel comfortable enough to fully replace it. I’ve tried everything on the Awesome Selfhosted list that would be a potential competitor, but nothing comes close to Google Photos. It’s honestly just such a solid product it’s really hard to find an open source/selfhosted replacement that works at least as well. And Google Photos is just so convenient when it comes to shared albums, it’s just slick.
My ideal solution would be to have Google Photos remain the source of truth, but have something else as a secondary backup. I looked into the idea of using Rclone to mount Google Photos and another backend (ie. Wasabi), and just replicating periodically from Google Photos to another location. But unfortunately at this time (and maybe forever), the Google Photos API doesn’t allow you to access photos/videos in their original form, only compressed. But I want the originals of course, so this doesn’t fly. The next thing I’ll be looking into when I have more time is automating Google Takeout periodically to fetch the original quality photos/videos, then upload to a backup location. But it’s such a janky idea and it rubs me the wrong way… But it might be the only way. Rclone would have been so perfect if only it could get the original quality content, but that’s on Google not enabling that capability.
I’ve been using a Synology for quite some time, and I started using Synology Photos when it was first released. I’ve got somewhere around 85,000 photos in it now, and it’s been great.
Face recognition pales compared to Google’s, but I feel that’s to be expected given the slight difference in computational resources.
I back up my phone, my wife’s phones (work and home), and our DSLR photos. It works as expected and has been rock solid.
I’ve used it on a DS1019+ and now have it running on a DS1821+.
I’ve tried photoprism and while I was quite impressed, it wasn’t quite there for me.
My most important feature by far is automatic backup and I’ve had zero issues outside of having to reauthenticate occasionally.
As always, YMMV… But it’s been great for me.
as someone else said, Immich has been good. you have to note that it backs up your photos from your phone to a server. The upload client is quite good, though there are times that it logs out the app when you upgrade the immich back end.
As for 3-2-1 type backups, i really want them to add a S3 type back up. I am not convinced that my server will live for ever, and i want to be able to restore from another location.
As for the other features in immich, i use the object detection a lot more than i expected, but i dont really use the face recognition yet (it is relatively new addition, so still needs work).
It also has a “partner” feature, that allows you to also view the photos from your partners account (if they approve).
As for backing up your entire library, i have not bulk uploaded all of my photos yet, and it does not write meta-data into the files, so it is a bit of lock in, though i think they are looking at side car files to allow you to move.
The webview is great, and the app is pretty good, though neither are perfect.
As someone else said, they are rapidly adding features and it is getting a decent userbase.
i can recommend it.
I think I’m going to rely on first party apps built into Asustor or Synology if I ever want to do S3 backups.
What do you mean by “it’s a bit of lock in”? So say you have a photo with the wrong date in the EXIF file, or if you want to manually write in EXIF data to photos without it, does that mean you couldn’t?
if you add meta-data, like the object detection, faces, albums, descriptions, tags etc. They are not written to the file, but stored in a DB.
So if you want to move somewhere, or edit your photos with a different tool, it will not be a pleasant experience.
Note: i love immich, and by far it is the most easy to use photo system i have that fits my needs. I really like the web view and the sharing capability.
Glad Synology photos have been working great for you! Really considering it as a setup and forget solution.
Does Synology photos have content aware tagging like search for dogs, food, landscape, etc.? It’s not a must for me but would be nice to have. And if the AI face detection got someone wrong, are you able to fix it or merge the same faces? Thanks!
No, it doesn’t have content aware functionality. I really wish it did, though having tried it with photoprism, I wasn’t impressed. Most of my pictures tagged with cat wither had no animal, or my dog. Maybe 150 out of 5000 cat pictures (my wife and I have been taking digital photos since the late 90s) got tagged as having a cat in them.
If the facial recognition is wrong, you can correct it, yes.
I’d say it’s a bit less accurate than Lightroom if you’ve used that for recognition.
Like many others have said, I’m keeping an eye on immich and plan to try it soon just to see!
(Deleted other reply by mistake!)
I’ve been using Google photos for years but I’m pretty keen to move to something open source and self hosted
Immich is very close to google photos, but it shouldn’t be used as your only backup of photos as its under development and changesao lot.
I auto upload to nextcloud and immich, nextcloud is good for storing them and immich is good for viewing them.
