[HN Gopher] My ridiculously robust photo management system (Immi...
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My ridiculously robust photo management system (Immich edition)
Author : jmathai
Score : 221 points
Date : 2026-01-28 13:17 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (jaisenmathai.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (jaisenmathai.com)
| dgxyz wrote:
| After going through 25 years of changing software every few years
| on this front I can't be bothered. Files on disk. Nothing over
| the top. Immich is just another thing to maintain. Another
| problem which will result in a wholesale migration down the line.
|
| If someone wants something I email it to them or upload it to a
| directory on a web server and send them the link. If I want
| something on my phone I'll zap it over with localsend.
|
| Photography is a hobby for me and I have a large family so I have
| a lot of photos. And a lot of editing to do. Currently moving
| from Lightroom to Darktable because again Lightroom tries to
| hammer me with library management and lock me into things.
| internet_points wrote:
| Same here, although one thing that's difficult with this is
| things like finding "that one photo we took 5 years ago which
| grandma used as a phone background". So now I gotta find the
| right external hard drive to plug in and fortunately the
| folders are by date but still it's a drag. So I'm considering
| looking into immich if it can just function as a server that
| shows thumbnails on some terabytes of date-sorted photos and
| videoes, no need for the machine learning stuff. Though I feel
| like there must be a less "heavy" solution than immich for
| this.
| dgxyz wrote:
| We really need an OS with a metadata capture and indexing
| system that isn't crap. Exif is metadata.
|
| "give me all files with a location in Chicago"
| ghgr wrote:
| I'm like you, and a big fan of Pigallery2 precisely for its
| simplicity. But it turns out that Immich does support external
| libraries, so you can keep your manual file management in your
| filesystem and still use Immich for efficient indexing, face
| recognition, quick picture retrieval by year, location, people
| etc...
|
| I'd recommend you try Immich (there's a docker compose version)
| and if you don't like it, you can just remove it and move on.
| cyberax wrote:
| Immich stores images in a configurable folder structure. That
| you can _change_ at any moment, and Immich will happily
| rearrange the files accordingly.
|
| Mine is something like "Album_Name/YEAR/MONTH/day-hour-minute-
| sec.jpg".
| jmathai wrote:
| Between storage templates and external libraries, Immich
| covers so many bases.
| stavros wrote:
| For me, there's nothing like being able to search for "brown
| dog" and get all the photos of my dog back. Not to mention all
| the other things Immich has that make managing a library
| pleasant.
|
| I not only urge you to try it, but to buy the "supporter" pack,
| Immich really deserves it.
| dgxyz wrote:
| I had a bunch of photos in Apple Photos which did that sort
| of thing. As a library management tool it's probably the best
| out there.
|
| But when you search for brown dog it'll bring back different
| coloured goats, horses and cows too. This is a problem in a
| large library.
| Someone wrote:
| A problem, but also way better than the solution "just look
| at every photo" you had without that image search feature.
|
| I think these manual tools tend to prefer recall ("make
| sure you return all the photos asked for") over precision
| (make sure you only return photos asked for") because of
| that.
|
| (Likely with exceptions for search terms such as "gorilla",
| where surfacing photos of people with black skin is a big
| no-no)
| Melatonic wrote:
| I found Google Photos much better for this comparatively to
| Apple
| butvacuum wrote:
| digikam does this as well, supposedly.
| vr46 wrote:
| That's cool, but when a friend died last summer, Immich allowed
| me to find all the digital photos I had of him, even out of
| focus in the background. I get many requests from friends for
| old pictures, "do you remember that night when we all did a
| group photo, etc etc?" and the search facility in Immich
| allowed me to in a minute what sometimes took years to find,
| when scouring folders in spare time.
| gf000 wrote:
| There is no need to replace it, certain changes can be
| additive. Immich falls into that category - you can still just
| see/use them as ordinary files. It just makes
| finding/viewing/sharing/processing them easier _on top_.
| sriacha wrote:
| You can keep your file current structure/workflow and just use
| immich as a viewer and search engine, read only.
| savolai wrote:
| Elodie makes a copy of all my images initially? Is the
| recommenddd route then to delete the files in original location?
| Seems unclear at first read.
| jmathai wrote:
| There's a `--trash` option for the import command. It's not the
| default behavior though. I recommend deleting the source photos
| once you've verified Elodie has organized the photos how you'd
| like.
| jacomoRodriguez wrote:
| Habe you tried nextcloud + memories app? Every metadata is stored
| in EXIF and the directory structure on disk defines the directory
| structure in the app (and vice versa). When you want to move your
| tooling or just do things manual again, grab the disk and your
| are ready.
| redrblackr wrote:
| People are really sleeping on nc memories, does all the good
| things but none of the "I decide how your images are stored and
| nothing else should touch them" that immich does.
|
| When I checked half a year ago memories (with the nc ecosystem)
| was still ahead in terms of features (gallery specific), albeit
| object tagging is rather crap in nc (faces better)
| Melatonic wrote:
| What do you mean by the first part ? Does immich store the
| metadata or something in a proprietary format ?
| thedonncha wrote:
| I used memories for a while but Immich is much better. I use an
| external library because I export images from Lightroom Classic
| and that's where I throw them in YYYY/MM directories. I could
| import them directly into Immich but I had problems with the
| Lightroom plugin I used. Especially when exporting hundreds of
| images at once.
| jacomoRodriguez wrote:
| what would you say: which features from Immich are better /
| not available in nc memories?
| kleinishere wrote:
| Any chance you're doing this for film photography? I also use
| a plugin (Negative Lab Pro) for negative inversion of film
| scans that keeps me stuck on Lightroom Classic. It would be
| great to get a pipeline beyond Classic but with the ability
| to jump back and re-edit. Curious if you have more details on
| what you do/don't connect into Immich from Lightroom.
| ZeWaren wrote:
| I'm very happy with Memories.
|
| I store my pictures on a NAS jail. That directory is mounted
| read-only on another jail with NC and Memories. I like the
| guarantee that my gallery app cannot alter my files.
|
| Also, many gallery apps don't allow browsing a directory tree.
| You have one level of "albums" and that's it. Memories support
| it. I have pictures 5-6 directories deep, following a system
| that makes sense to me.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Where it does store the metadata or database info ?
| ZeWaren wrote:
| In the NextCloud instance somewhere.
| shantara wrote:
| I migrated from Apple Photos to Immich a couple of months ago,
| removing the iCloud subscription, and couldn't be happier. It was
| the most hassle free piece of self-hosted software I've had so
| far. Very easy to install and everything just works. Context and
| OCR search are amazing. Mobile apps could be better, but they are
| constantly being improved.
|
| My favorite feature is being able to setup a container on my
| Linux desktop that has a GPU access and can run ML workloads for
| image processing whenever I turn the computer on, as my NAS
| (where Immich resides) is a low power machine without a dedicated
| GPU. They even have ROCM support, so it works even without an
| Nvidia GPU. Being able to spread such workloads over your local
| network feels like a magic that has been forgotten in an era of
| blackbox cloud providers.
| bjackman wrote:
| I have a PiKVM attached to my PC at home, so at some point I'm
| thinking of setting up a crazy demand-scaling scheme where when
| my underpowered homelab nodes can power up the PC when they
| need to run a heavy workload.
| shantara wrote:
| This sounds like a fun idea to explore!
| Nextgrid wrote:
| You can do this easier with Wake on LAN. See
| https://danielpgross.github.io/friendly_neighbor/howto-
| sleep... for prior art.
| bjackman wrote:
| WoL is easier if it works. My experience has been that with
| consumer hardware it usually doesn't. Debugging it is more
| hassle than it's worth IMO. I think if you don't have a
| proper mobo with a BMC then just throwing in a KVM is
| easier on average.
| solarkraft wrote:
| > My favorite feature is being able to setup a container on my
| Linux desktop that has a GPU access and can run ML workloads
| for image processing whenever I turn the computer on, as my NAS
| (where Immich resides) is a low power machine without a
| dedicated GPU
|
| Okay, sold. This is also my setup and I was being held back by
| thinking that the experience would be bad due to it. But this
| will work for me!
| gingerlime wrote:
| any pointers on how it works with immich on the NAS and your
| desktop "contributing" processing power?
| crtasm wrote:
| I found this page: https://docs.immich.app/guides/remote-
| machine-learning
| ninkendo wrote:
| Interesting. How did it work getting your photos off of iCloud?
| Does Apple give you a good way to get an archive of all of your
| photos? That is, the original quality photos, without manually
| downloading them individually? (I currently have 446 GB of
| photos in iCloud...)
| shantara wrote:
| Immich iOS app supports backing up photos directly from
| iCloud in original resolution, with the all EXIF data
| included. I had 230 GB of photos myself, and I left the phone
| on the charger overnight with the app running in the
| foreground and screen locking disabled. In the morning
| everything was imported.
|
| Some people have instead set Photos app on a Mac to download
| original photos from the iCloud library and then moved the
| files directly into the server. I have not personally tried
| this method though.
| chamomeal wrote:
| > Immich iOS app supports backing up photos directly from
| iCloud in original resolution
|
| wait that is just crazy!!! Dang my dad is going to flip out
| when I tell him about this. He's got like 1.5 TB of photos
| in iCloud and has been searching for a way to get them off.
| And we're so close to our family storage limit that he gets
| mad at me when I text him pictures hahaha
| dole wrote:
| iCloud Photos Downloader isn't user friendly or pretty, but I
| finally managed to rip my entire collection without having to
| install any apple software.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46578921
| moodyScarf wrote:
| i havent seen anyone else mention it so i will.
| privacy.apple.com lets you export your apple data similar to
| google takeout
| the_cosmos wrote:
| There is a community-supported CLI program called immich-go
| that directly supports reading in iCloud and Google takeout
| archives, as well as local directories. It works great, and
| has gobs of import options to set up albums and tags. [
| https://github.com/simulot/immich-go ]
| nozzlegear wrote:
| How does selecting or uploading photos work on iOS if you don't
| have any in Apple Photos? Not all apps let you choose to upload
| from the files app where you can select the provider, e.g.
| uploading an image to Facebook in Safari always opens the
| picker for Apple Photos.
|
| Edit: wait I'm dumb, I just checked mobile Facebook and the
| upload button shows a pop up with choices for "Photo Library",
| "Take a Photo", or "Files".
| jms703 wrote:
| Can you explain how you're able to run ML workloads on another
| computer? Setting up Immich this weekend on a mini Pc and would
| love to throw my GPU in my larger PC at the problem.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| It's just a feature of immich. Administration > Settings >
| Machine Learning Setting and set the remote ML address.
|
| Obviously you need to setup the ml client on the other
| computer
| shantara wrote:
| Check out the guide on their website:
|
| https://docs.immich.app/guides/remote-machine-learning/
|
| https://docs.immich.app/features/ml-hardware-acceleration/
| tecleandor wrote:
| You run a Docker container on another machine and configure
| Immich to point to its IP address. I do that when I have to
| add a lot of photos or reingest all the photos with a
| different model, so I point to the "gaming" that has a 3060.
| brador wrote:
| Photo printer in the second study anyone can connect to and a
| 100+ stack of photo paper and some photo album holders. Done.
|
| I lose no sleep.
|
| The funnest part of coming home is what everyone prints when we
| get back.
| code_biologist wrote:
| Lovely idea. You got a photo printer model you like? I've been
| meaning to get a photo printer, but I'm scarred by experiences
| with inkjets back in the day.
| hypercube33 wrote:
| If they are printing 100 or more prints a month even they are
| probably absolutely fine - inkjets die when not used because
| ink dries on the jets or other places.
| pbalau wrote:
| If you are ok with 6x4 prints, postcard size, then canon
| selphy cp1500 might do it.
|
| It doesn't do great with bw photos, but colour pictures are
| good enough.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| What kind of photo printer technology? Inkjet is expensive and
| fades. Dye sub and laser are usually better.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| Agree with this strongly. It's nice to have thousands of
| photos, but if what you're trying to do is preserve memories,
| you do that best by interacting with the photos.
|
| Choosing the photos to include, plus doing the scrapbooking
| bits to decorate the photos, and including all the bits and
| bobs you might have acquired from whatever even you're
| memorializing, this locks the memories in far better than a
| carefully architected storage system that, in the end, is just
| a giant wad of binary data.
|
| This goes double (or triple) when you have young children.
|
| By all means maintain some kind of digital storage, but make
| your primary physical.
| 9x39 wrote:
| I use Google Photos, Apple Photos, and also print to Walmart
| through the excellent workflow Google Photos has setup.
| Obviously there has to be a printer in your town.
|
| Make an album, print to Walmart on their pro printer, grab it a
| little later for a few bucks.
| jwr wrote:
| Relying on EXIF is a good thing. But if you limit yourself to
| ONLY using EXIF, you can't group images, make one image in a
| group the primary image, assign common metadata to the entire
| group, etc.
|
| All turned out to be essential in my photo archives, especially
| as I started scanning old pictures. You get the front and back
| side of a photo, or you scan a large-format drawing in 16 scans
| and store them alongside the merged one, etc.
|
| Aperture used to handle it pretty well, but Apple dropped it. I
| learned my lesson, and now I'll be doing things differently.
| awesomeMilou wrote:
| What are you currently using?
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _Aperture used to handle it pretty well, but Apple dropped
| it._
|
| If you still miss it, note that Nitro (macOS, iPad, iPhone) is
| Aperture's spiritual successor, created by its former Sr.
| Director of Engineering. https://www.gentlemencoders.com/nitro-
| for-macos/
| jmathai wrote:
| I solved the "one photo in multiple albums" EXIF problem by
| using Keywords. Each album is a Keyword.
|
| But yes, there are some other limitations that would be much
| harder to solve. But it's a tradeoff I've decided to make - if
| I can't figure out an EXIF-based solution then I'm not going to
| invest time using it because it will likely be lost in 5-10
| years.
| s03nk3 wrote:
| Storing in EXIF seemed also the go-to solution for me. Until I
| ran into deduplication and backup management problems due to the
| changed files.
| jmathai wrote:
| You mean because the hash of the photo changes?
|
| I've solved that by materializing every photo to a
| deterministic folder path. So it's not possible to have the
| same exact photo in my library.
| ListenLinda wrote:
| Use sidecar files instead. I believe the professional tools all
| use them as well.
| bix6 wrote:
| > I was very optimistic about Synology Photos but it was
| unfortunately underwhelming.
|
| Anyone have info on this vs Immich? I just got my Syn so been
| trying their native app which seems fine so far but not sure what
| I'm missing.
| ldh wrote:
| Personally I've avoided using any Synology-specific
| functionality. It's not as transparent and seems kind of
| brittle. I feel like that's going to pay off because after a
| couple of years I'm pretty sure I'm going to switch to an open
| source solution instead, and I won't have to look for
| alternatives to systems I'm already using.
| jmathai wrote:
| I found Immich to be significantly higher quality. Nothing
| prevents you from running Immich in a newer synology which
| support containers.
|
| Mine is so old that it doesn't and it's also under powered -
| else I'd be running Immich on it.
| conqrr wrote:
| Immich and Restic have completely covered my needs and don't need
| to use Google photos anymore.
| ohyoutravel wrote:
| I tried this but didn't have luck. Intel NUC 13 i7 with 16gb ram,
| Immich in a docker container. Photos on my NAS. The moment I open
| chrome or Firefox to Immich and get past the onboarding, it just
| locks up. Maybe 50,000 photos in the library. Disappointing
| because I really wanted to like it, and have moved pretty much
| everything else to self hosted.
| budding2141 wrote:
| Very strange. I've got roughly 40k photos and Immich runs just
| fine on i5-6xxx old minipc with 8 gigs of ram. Migrated to
| Immich a couple of years ago from Photoprism (which was fine as
| well, I just prefer the UI of Immich).
| closewith wrote:
| Our family Immich server has a few hundred thousand photos
| running in Docker and never gets close to 8GB memory. Maybe
| submit a bug report if you have the inclination.
| dddddaviddddd wrote:
| I host immich inside a Linux VM on FreeBSD, with 6 GB of RAM.
| Fourth generation Intel processor. The initial jobs to parse
| metadata took a day or two, but now it's perfectly snappy and
| useable.
| mmastrac wrote:
| Do you have WebGL disabled or is WebGL not working?
|
| https://github.com/immich-app/immich/issues/24581
| tootie wrote:
| Is it persistent? Thumbnail generation can bog down the server
| after a giant upload. Mine was frozen after I first set it up
| but eventually caught up and now works very smoothly.
| mtsolitary wrote:
| Check you don't have a circular import on your NAS. I had
| similar issues because I had my photos at /nas/photos and my
| Immich metadata folder configured as a subfolder of that. So it
| kept reindexing its own metadata.
| dariosalvi78 wrote:
| I sync my photos with an old Raspberypi 3 with Syncthing, then
| have my own very basic web photo gallery:
| https://github.com/dariosalvi78/simple-gallery which supports
| permissions and thumbnails. If you have a sensible folder
| structure, for example by year/event you don't need anything
| else. I am also working on face recognition and geo location, but
| the hardware limitations are challenge (a fun one to solve tho).
| Melatonic wrote:
| Manual photo structure like this is highly underrated.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| If you want something equivalent to Immich but don't want to deal
| with self hosting, Ente is a good option. It's E2EE!
| OptionOfT wrote:
| 1 thing to know about with Immich:
|
| It has botched slow motion uploading. It uploads an export at
| 30fps instead of maintaining 120/240fps.
| gingerlime wrote:
| do you mean it loses the original fps rate, or just that you
| can't easily view it?
| OptionOfT wrote:
| It loses the original FPS, akin to flattening a PSD to JPG.
| gingerlime wrote:
| From what I was reading immich should preserve your
| original media. I saw this bug report[0] but it's not clear
| if it's an app upload bug, iOS bug or maybe depends on the
| device??
|
| I don't use immich (yet) but this is the kind of stuff I
| worry about. I'm planning to use it in read only mode
| though and sync my photos using PhotoSync rather than rely
| on the app.
|
| [0] https://github.com/immich-app/immich/issues/17576
| UltraSane wrote:
| I've created a pretty nice picture manager using Neo4j,
| perceptual hashes, and various latent embeddings but you have to
| be able to write Cypher queries to use it.
| bayjorix wrote:
| I recently set up Immich as a backup to Apple Photos, but the
| mobile app had trouble with my library (120,000 images and 4,000
| videos, about 1.6 TB).
|
| I've stumbled on Immibridge which solved my exact problem
| perfectly, and uploaded the images overnight
|
| https://github.com/emerysilb/immibridge
| Melatonic wrote:
| What about doing the opposite ? I have my phone auto upload to
| Apple photos (iCloud) in full quality - downloading for backup
| can be a pain
| SilverElfin wrote:
| I wish I could just get photos out of iCloud. The iCloud app ok
| windows doesn't work period. Authentication issues, taking up CPU
| but not actually doing anything, and creating empty files that
| are just shells for what's in the cloud.
|
| It is so absolutely terrible that I think it is purposeful. But
| if I could get it all, I could consolidate into something else.
| Either way, it's frustrating enough that I've stopped buying
| apple.
| digiown wrote:
| You can grab a data export from privacy.apple.com
| SilverElfin wrote:
| But the how do I get the remaining latest files that aren't
| in it? Manually from the iCloud website?
|
| Also do they include all the variants in that export like the
| edits, filters, etc? I get the feeling those may be a
| proprietary Apple only thing.
| mtsolitary wrote:
| Check out icloudpd. It's a bit fiddly but it definitely does
| work once you have it set up.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| Vibecoded, ok.
| jmathai wrote:
| This specific plugin was purely written by Claude Code,
| correct. The prior 10k lines of python were not.
|
| Without Claude Code, the plugin would probably only exist in my
| imagination.
|
| I don't personally care who writes the code. There's plenty of
| contributors already.
| marius_ wrote:
| I was running Immich for a while until the iPhone client app on
| my wife's phone completely stopped syncing photos. So I ended up
| vibe coding my own photo management software in .NET using
| PostgreSql/Redis and React front end (PWA). Has face recognition
| too (used the same models Immich uses from huggingface). Works
| perfectly, photo library scanning/face recognition/thumbnail
| creation/etc performance is WAY better than Immich (uses .NET
| background jobs and lots of parallelism and hardware acceleration
| on my Mac mini server). Turns out if you only care for the thing
| to work on your own gear you can optimize the code for it quite a
| bit. It took 2 weekends and Claude code. And with tailscale, it's
| hosted on my Mac mini at home and accessible from anywhere
| through https. I have around 40k+ photos+ phone videos, and the
| server is a base Mac mini previous gen (8GB ram). Oh, and forgot
| to add, the app supports downloading/moving photos from iCloud
| through the undocumented CloudKit APIs behind the iCloud.com web
| app, complete with 2fa.
| dakial1 wrote:
| Some time ago I configured Photostructure on my Synology (with
| the amazing help of the author, @mceachen) and the most paindful
| part was rescuing my 1.5TB of photos from Google Photos. Takeout
| was very cumbersome to use and download 100+ files of 4gb, so
| ultimately resorted to paying a higher tier at Google Drive,
| using takeout Google Drive option and the sync to the NAS. I
| still don't have a good method to keep everything in sync as
| Google Photos does not offer a viable option for a cloud-to-
| premises sync.
| mceachen wrote:
| I wrote some tips and tricks that I've found to help coax
| Google Takeouts into working:
| https://photostructure.com/faq/takeout/
|
| Also: you should try out the latest build!
| https://photostructure.com/about/v2026.1/
|
| FWIW all of these projects rely on ExifTool (which people
| should donate to!) and my open-source node.js wrapper (that
| adds concurrency, does a ton of extra parsing work, and makes
| things a bit more ergonomic to live with):
| https://github.com/photostructure/exiftool-vendored.js
| bombela wrote:
| For what is worth, google takeout can export in 50GB tgz.
|
| Downloading the takeout files is miserable through, the
| download link is only valid when being downloaded via human
| interaction in a web browser.
|
| There is a silly trick. Start the download, pause it. Get the
| cookies from the page (only need to do that once for the
| session). Then copy the download link. Now you can curl on your
| server. When the file is downloaded, you can then cancel the
| download in your web browser. And do the same for the next
| file. One at a time.
|
| Warning: google will cancel downloads if you run more than one
| or two at a time. After 3 download (failed or not) of a file
| google will delete the whole takeout.
|
| The amount of engineering they must have deployed to
| purposefully crimple takeout with plausible deniability must be
| significant.
| bombela wrote:
| Immich is genuinely good.
|
| I run it on a credit sized intel N100 board with a few spinning
| disks. There was nothing to do, it all just worked right away.
|
| Everything is fast and smooth. The AI indexing and search just
| work(tm) and it is faster than google photo ever was. And there
| is no censorship on the AI search terms.
|
| I also like that I can configure the filesystem hierarchy I
| prefer.
| Melatonic wrote:
| What kind of indexing and searching can you do ? I've found
| Google sometimes struggles with certain things (surprisingly)
| like searching for a date range if I don't specify the date in
| the ideal format. For other stuff like "stars over trees" or
| similar it can work quite well.
| reddalo wrote:
| I honestly think that the search feature of Immich is
| _better_ than Google Photos.
|
| Maaaybe AI-based searches like "cat on a red car" are better
| on Google (but I wouldn't bet my life on it), but Immich
| applies the exact filters that I want (Google is too fuzzy).
|
| Also, unlike Google, Immich doesn't censor your searches, so
| I can look up for naked pictures or photos of gorillas, and
| actually see the results.
| bombela wrote:
| Search by date, OCR, AI context, people's face, location, by
| map, and I probably forget some. And from any result you can
| then jump to its location in the timeline. Back history
| navigation works properly to boot. And all of that is very
| pleasantly fast. I am very sensitive to latency, and Immich
| is one of the rare software that actually feels fast. Google
| photo is trash in comparison.
| upcoming-sesame wrote:
| All I want is to automatically periodically backup my Google
| Photos to some S3 compatible storage like B2. I want to do that
| in case Google nukes my account one day for whatever reason.
|
| I have not found any way to do that until today.
|
| In addition, my local network is slow and I don't have much
| storage I am limited to solutions that are cloud-to-cloud.
|
| If anyone has any idea, please help me out
| jmathai wrote:
| rclone. https://rclone.org/
| upcoming-sesame wrote:
| I am very much aware of rclone, but don't see how it solve
| the problem I mentioned
| jmathai wrote:
| Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're looking for. Rclone
| has a Google Photos backend and an S3 backend. I haven't
| used it but assumed you could simply copy from Google
| Photos into S3.
|
| https://rclone.org/googlephotos/
| upcoming-sesame wrote:
| "From March 31, 2025 rclone can only download photos it
| uploaded"
|
| Also, it still requires to use my bandwidth or to have a
| VPS running and using it's own bandwidth
| Trasmatta wrote:
| I went down the same rabbit hole recently, and there are
| basically no good options except to periodically do a full
| Google Takeout of your images. There were tools that used to
| work, but Google broke them.
|
| One of the many reasons I finally moved off Google Photos.
| 9x39 wrote:
| Presumably you take your photos on your phone, so can you sync
| from there?
|
| You could manually do it with Google Takeout -> <S3 backed
| service> before letting your phone sync handle it going forward
| if that's a big backlog.
|
| For example, I use Apple and Google on my phone to do this, I
| think you'd just need to find some app/service combo.
| ListenLinda wrote:
| seems like he missed the mark. why not sync to side-car files?
| What about videos?
| jmathai wrote:
| I did say it was robust...
|
| I include video [1] and audio (.m4a) [2] files via EXIF.
|
| For text files [3], I add a JSON block at the top to mimic
| EXIF.
|
| I don't want to deal with an additional sidecar file per asset.
| The risk of losing one during a transfer between systems is too
| high. It's a conscious decision and not an oversight.
|
| [1]
| https://github.com/jmathai/elodie/blob/2645bf25b81c63f65d6f1...
|
| [2]
| https://github.com/jmathai/elodie/blob/master/elodie/media/a...
|
| [3]
| https://github.com/jmathai/elodie/blob/master/elodie/media/t...
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