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.