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.