this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
160 points (97.6% liked)

Selfhosted

40183 readers
1008 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

What are you using as a Google photos alternative? Currently I'm using Nextcloud but I'm thinking of switching to a more dedicated solution.

I mainly need to upload photos from my device automatically, have an UI to see and classify them, albuns and sharing.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] jaschen@lemmynsfw.com 13 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I will get downvoted for this but a Synology Nas is simple and does 90% of what google will do. They also have their own DDNS or you can use whatever you like.

Downside is tou have to buy their hardware. Unless you do the Xpenology route.

[–] EchoCranium@lemmy.zip 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Been using a Synology NAS for the past year for automatic photo backups. Take a photo, it gets copied to my drive at home so long as there's internet access available. No issues so far. Turned off my backups to Google.

[–] walden@sub.wetshaving.social 1 points 10 months ago (4 children)

What happens when your Synology fails? Do you have offsite backup to Backblaze or something similar?

[–] jaschen@lemmynsfw.com 3 points 10 months ago

This is my setup using the 3, 2, 1 rule:

3: Raid 5 setup with 2 unused drives and setup to automatically spool up and recover if one of the drives starts failing. 2: off-site at the father in laws house (using a Xpenology super tiny PC and an external drive) 1: Monthly Backblaze

While there is risk, it's def safer if not safer than Google drive.

[–] Showroom7561@lemmy.ca 3 points 10 months ago

What happens when your Synology fails?

I can't speak for other users, but my Synology setup looks like this:

  • NAS - 1 drive redundancy via hybrid RAID.
  • Important folders have recycling bins enabled and I have versioning, too.
  • Daily backup to a local external drive.
  • Daily, encrypted backup to the cloud.
  • Monthly, off-site HDD backup.

This is honestly a much more secure way of storing my photos than Google Photos.

[–] EchoCranium@lemmy.zip 1 points 10 months ago (3 children)

It's a dual drive redundant setup. Unless something catastrophic happens, I doubt both drives will go out at the same time. I could do an offsite backup as well, but just haven't.

[–] DrinkMonkey@lemmy.ca 3 points 10 months ago

I was very satisfied with their pricing for offsite backups, and the ease of setup. Definitely worth a look.

[–] walden@sub.wetshaving.social 3 points 10 months ago

The number of redundant drives actually doesn't make much difference, but it does "help". Instead of picturing individual drive failures, picture a house fire.

Also picture the next step after one of the drives fails -- you'll be copying all of that data off of your 1 good drive, putting a lot of stress on it. That drive is likely from the same batch, same age, etc. as the failed drive. The likelihood of your good drive failing during the recovery process is higher than one might like.

[–] beerclue@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago

RAID is not backup :) And yes, it happened to me for 4 drives in a 16 drive system to fail in the span of just a few days (same batch).

[–] Dlayknee@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

Not who you're replying to but yes, Synology will let you automate backups to a cloud/service (and you definitely should!)

[–] akilou@sh.itjust.works 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I have a Synology NAS, and while their Synology Photos is really good, it's no match for Google Photos. It's not their fault though, any self-hosted solution is going to be harder to share photos and do collaborative albums and such. And Google Photos image and face recognition is just not matched. I backup my entire photo library to Synology Photos but most of them are also in Google Photos for ease of access and sharing.

[–] jaschen@lemmynsfw.com 1 points 10 months ago

Google definitely has better face recognition. You can pick up a QNAP and put a Google coral and essentially do the same thing.

I also run a 3rd party software that does the tagging. But it's annoying to do each time.