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?
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Immich is rapidly growing into the closest solution for replacing google photos. It’s not fully there yet, but there is very active development going on and it’s advancing quickly.
I’ve been using a Synology for quite some time, and I started using Synology Photos when it was first released. I’ve got somewhere around 85,000 photos in it now, and it’s been great.
Face recognition pales compared to Google’s, but I feel that’s to be expected given the slight difference in computational resources.
I back up my phone, my wife’s phones (work and home), and our DSLR photos. It works as expected and has been rock solid.
I’ve used it on a DS1019+ and now have it running on a DS1821+.
I’ve tried photoprism and while I was quite impressed, it wasn’t quite there for me.
My most important feature by far is automatic backup and I’ve had zero issues outside of having to reauthenticate occasionally.
As always, YMMV… But it’s been great for me.
I use PiGallery 2. Very lightweight and doesn’t mess with my existing folderstructure. I use syncthing to upload photos from my phone to a folder on my server.
Adding a factor to the mix, what about mobile clients?
Personally I use Nextcloud for the auto-upload, but it’s more of a Google Drive/Office 365 replacement than a Google Photos one.
I’ve been using Google photos for years but I’m pretty keen to move to something open source and self hosted
Immich is very close to google photos, but it shouldn’t be used as your only backup of photos as its under development and changesao lot.
I auto upload to nextcloud and immich, nextcloud is good for storing them and immich is good for viewing them.
Yeah I think I would combine it with synching and back in time for redundancy and backup
I’ve got a Synology NAS DS416play for several years now as a trusty backup/storage. But not using their Photo Galary feature. What I like about Synology is their long term support. They still offer software updates for this rather old model.
I’m still using Google Photos as main photo dumping ground as it has clients for iOS and macOS which automatically uploads all photos there and of course for the search and sharing feature. I’m even paying for the extra storage needed to host all the family pictures on a 2TB plan.
My concern having only the Synology would be that in case of fire/flood/zombies I’d loose all this stuff. Sure it’s a 4 disk raid, but I’d have to make regular backups off-site. Which is pita and expensive as well. Synology does offer Backup to various cloud locations though. But overall I considered this more expensive than just paying for the Google Account.
I use syncthing to upload my Android phone photos to my Unraid server and then use Photoprism to manage them. I use Duplicacy to backup photos (and other data) to Backblaze. I tried Immich briefly and just preferred the setup and look/feel of Photoprism. To be fair, that was about a year and a half ago, and I know both apps have grown a lot since then.
Been using a Synology DS920+ for a few years now, using Moments as my photo backup/viewer.
I will note, however, that the newer version of Synology OS doesn’t run Moments, but “Photos”, and that one lacks subject recognition.
For me, subject recognition was the key reason for even using Google Photos, so to lose that feature upgrading to the latest OS would be a major step backwards.
Just wanted to put that out there for anyone who’s considering buying a new Synology NAS (with the latest OS).
I’m using Synology, it’s good enough but I don’t like that the software is not Free Software. In the long run I will probably need to build something from scratch manually.
But if you’re using Synology Photos then I wrote some scripts for it https://github.com/jeena/synology-pictures one which randomly finds pictures of family members and puts them into a place where another script (Home Assistant) then shows them on the TV if nobody is watching anything.
And another one which does this “Today, X years ago” also for family members and pushes it into our Matrix family chat.
I have a Synology NAS and use the Photos/Memories app from Synology to back up my photos from my phone. It works pretty well. Every so often the app will stop syncing unless you open it. I haven’t had that problem in a few months, so it may be solved.
I just recently set up Immich and haven’t tested syncing from phone yet. I did upload a bunch of photos through the web interface to play around. Face recognition “mostly” works. If for some reason it doesn’t see two pictures of the same person as being the same person there is no way to forcibly merge. Likewise, if it sees two people as being the same person, there is no way to forcibly split them.
I do have Piwigo setup to host other images. Didn’t know about plugins for syncing; I’ll have to try that out.
Thanks for the input! Do setting up multiple apps mean having to set up different photo databases/folders? Or can they share the same folders and photos?
I don’t run the immich server on my Synology. That is my safe back up of files before going to could storage. If hate for a glitch in immich to wipe out my local backup.So I really can’t say for sure.
@falkerie71 I generally backup my phone to my main NAS and have syncthing configured to Sync my main NAS to backup NAS. My primary NAS is now discontinued WD ex4 and backup NAS is truenas running as a VM on proxmox.
The biggest issue I have with auto backup is that it backs up all the photos including the auto downloaded media from Whatsapp that I have no need to retain.I also use Syncthing with SyncTrayzor to sync files between my devices! Doesn’t Syncthing have the “ignore patterns” function? You can use that to ignore certain folders like your Whatsapp folder I think!
