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?
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.