It looks like Google Photos is no longer going to be an option for me.
What’s your weapon of choice for storing your photos? My criteria:
- Easily back up photos taken on my Android phone (ideally automatically).
- Make photos easily searchable, preferably using image recognition.
- Not lock me into a specific ecosystem (like Meta or Apple).
- Not require paying to rent space.
Google Photos is great on the first two but fails on the last two.
@peterdrake www.getmonument.com - you buy your own USB or M.2 (SATA) SSD for storage. And expand as needed over time. Multi-user, has face recognition and ML-based tagging, plus all sorts of other nifty search criteria.
@peterdrake https://getmonument.com/ - link didn't work on the first one. Also get version 2, not version 1 - significantly faster device on gen 2.
@goeland86 Intriguing. Anybody else have experience with getmonument.com? (Amazon reviews are mixed.)
Is there a FOSS solution?
@peterdrake if there is, I'm not aware of it. Nextcloud can do the automatic photo backup, but the rest of it? Nowhere close. I've tried.
@peterdrake Found the link to the Monument 2... It's not exactly sales through their shop - but I have had my unit already for nearly 6 months, and the company is doing well afaik. https://monument2.getmonument.com/?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=blog_link&utm_campaign=blog
@goeland86 So does this device remain on and connected to the internet at all times, as your own personal photo server?
Can I upload photos to it from my phone when I'm not physically near it?
If I want to share, say, a half-hour video with someone, will that consume a lot of my bandwidth when they view it?
Does it work with Linux?
@goeland86 Also, can I get it to only do the data transfer from my phone when it's connected to wifi?
@peterdrake yes. It's very well thought out, and constantly improving, if slowly.
@peterdrake yes, it's an always on device, and you can access it from anywhere. It has some clever AWS-based network magic to avoid punching security holes in your home router.
If someone tries to load your photos/videos they'll be using your home internet bandwidth to load it, though there is optimization for network impact.
There is a Linux desktop app on to of Mac and Windows, yes.
@goeland86 I ordered one about a week ago. All I have is an estimated delivery date of "June 2022", so I'll have to back stuff up to an external drive while I wait.
@peterdrake ooof, I didn't realize they were backlogged that far out 😱
When I had a (paid) static IP I had a sort of "home cloud", and I stored directly my photos on my own disks, transferring them via FTP.
But image recognition requires a lot of computing resources.
If you’re not concerned with privacy, you could put them on your own public server and let google’s spider crawl through them and then use google’s public image recognition/search.
@Pat I'm not overly concerned, but full-on public to the world seems a bit much.
@peterdrake Well FatBoy Slim for Weapon of Choice but using a Linux or BSD server to sync to.
@peterdrake Let us know if you find a good substitute for G- photos. Till now have just kept making new Google addresses. 6 so far!