I need to put some order with the photos I take and I receive with my android phone. Just now I use Nextcloud sync client to upload and Photo/Memories Nextcloud Apps to manage photos.
However, I am not very happy with this setup because of the lack of one Android Application for photos and, thus, the photo gallery of my phone is totally different to the Photo/Memories timeline. And photos are not deleted from my mobile phone when I delete them in Photo/Memories. Which selfhosted photo manager do you think is better to backup and manage photos in sync with the phone?
A second question, is it better to manage the photo gallery with a folder structure or with the album functionality of the Photo application? Which is the best interoperable solution? If I use albums in Memories then I can export those albums to Immich, Librephotos… ? Or I would have to create all the albums again after the export?
i’m a fan of immich, but i don’t think it deletes photos from your phone when deleting it on the server.
I wanted to try Immich but I quickly found out you can’t simply point it at an existing folder structure like say Plex or Jellyfin. You have to “import” all your files via a client and if you’re like me and already have thousands of images in Nextcloud then even with their bulk upload CLI tool it is too much of a hassle.
Plus I don’t want to be locked into their format, I want to be able to switch if the project goes under or I find something better later on. Nextcloud’s photo management is not great but I am willing to sack some speed and usability for using raw folders rather than a database.
Immich actually organizes your photos in a simple directory structure, which is customizable (want to group by year? year+month? by day? not at all?). The images are right there in your file system and have the original file name.
The directory is “read-only” though, for the same reason as there is a need to import existing libraries: database synchronization.
Immich offers many features that require a database or pre-processing of files, which makes it fast and feature-rich. If you modify files outside of Immich, it cannot know what changed and loses track of where your media is.
As I said, the (read-only) file structure is always there in case you want to switch.
I didn’t see any unique format for how Immich stores photos, they’re just on the filesystem as images.
From what I understand (I could be wrong) all of the images get imported into a single folder and albums are done via the database. I currently have my albums in individual folders. So not only would I have to recreate dozens of albums but I don’t think there would be any way to export them in the future. But if that isn’t how it works maybe I will give it another go.
AFAIK immich organize photos with albums not in folders. So, If i move from immich to another software (librephotos, photoprism…), the new software is aware of albums? I am worried on organizing my photos every time I change of photo management application.
That’s an organizational issue. I think almost all photo software (except lychee) is more “hands-off, everything internal” because of a few reasons:
-
If you sync between clients, do you want the software constantly shuffling files around on every device if something is changed in one album?
-
if you have chronological folders, do you want to make duplicates (double or triple the space) for every album including said picture?
-
If you work with albums, how do you deal with random folders not in albums?
-
how do you deal with conflicts of photos being put in different albums on different synced devices?
The solution for all of these is “leave the files where they are” and deal with everything via databases to organize photos. This way you can export or download albums for giving to someone and it will just pull all of the relevant files without having sync or reorganization issues.
I tried photoprism and thought it was pretty neat feature-wise. If I recall correctly they even sort received photos in a sensible date-based structure automatically. Don’t think they have an official app but maybe some third party stuff; the web UI is mobile friendly though.
To talk backups, I’d deploy the thing using containers and then back up the volumes any way you like.
This may not be the ideal solution for you, especially due to lack of decent android support. The workflow would probably be something like take photo -> sync to protoprism to sort -> view in photoprism gallery, which may also be too convoluted for you. Also, I’m not sure what you mean by the last paragraph.
I use a folder structure in Nextcloud where each “album” folder starts with YYYY-MM-DD so I can sort them alphabetically. I delete the photos from my phone when I copy them to the Nextcloud folder. I can always look them up using the app. This is some manual work, but it has worked very well for long-term archival and it will still be organized and searchable on other platforms as long as they support files and folders.
This is a great question. The photo ecosystem is one where I haven’t found a FOSS soln that hits all the marks of subscription services. I would focus on whatever helps you search.
I do feel like if files have accurate dates in the file system and in metadata, then folders based on event make sense.
However subscription photo services are very good at automatically sorting - these dates are holidays so these pictures are probably for that holiday. Your home location is here, these pictures are over there so this must be your trip to there. These pictures have these people or animals, so these pictures are about them.
With that comes seamless integration across devices - a picture taken at time now can be seen on a tv or laptop at time +x. Etc.
I have left the FOSS photo world but am definitely interested to see where it is. With digital photography finding pictures is the real trick. using folders like a tag hierarchy at least gets you in the ball park imo. But I have no practical knowledge any more.
Google Photos is a non-starter for me as a backup solution because they scan the actual content of them. No thanks. I know it’s convenient to search for, say, “all photos with my nephew little Richie in them,” but it’s not worth giving them more information about me than they already do.
Well, Google Photos shouldn’t be considered a “backup” solution to begin with. Never mind that both Google and Apple scan the content in their respective services, but there’s just no guarantee that they don’t modify the data on cloud. “Oooh guys, we just invented a revolutionary new photo compression algorithm! Also hosting data is kinda expensive! So pay up if you want your originals.” …and there’s occasional reports that these services just straight up corrupted some old files while no one was looking at them. Good going.
I just treat my Android phone like any other camera I own and use. Copy the files from phone to PC and from there to my NAS, and I use ACDSee’s DAM functionality.
