Not sure if this is the right place but lets give it a go.

We have a family account on iCloud so all iPhones (5 of them) can sync items on the phones to their laptops and so forth. One feature that is eating all the storage space we have on iCloud and that would be Photo’s. We ran out of space and thus Backups, Photos, Contacts, etc. will not sync anymore. We can add more space in iCloud but I am not keen on keeping buying storage space with Apple.

So my thought was to have all Photo’s older then xyz days/months/years stored somewhere else to free up space in that iCloud account. I do not want to delete these older photo’s, just have them stored somewhere else but still accessible. So ideally I would be able to tell some app/solution to move photo’s from a phone to something self hosted and the user of that phone can then keep seeing the photo’s in either the Photos app or the app related to the self hosted solution.

Honestly, even more ideal would be to ‘tell’ the Photos app from Apple to use the self hosted storage and not the iCloud storage. This would make the transition transparent to all the family members. Some features might no longer work (that ‘memories’ feature perhaps?) but that is OK, being able to store photo’s is more important.

Apologies if this has been asked before but my searching, which is admittedly is not that great from my side, found no answer I could translate to my issue. Any help is appreciated!

FYI, I am running Docker at home and can make services available on the internet with ngnix in front of it as proxy. I can also run a new service of course, the self hosting bit as it were.

  • biomechLulu@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    27 days ago

    Take a look at immich!

    Does a lot of what you stated above. Plus, it has machine learning built in so you can use features like ‘memories’ and face detection, etc. I transitioned from Google photos to immich a little less than a year ago and haven’t looked back!

    • reddwarf@feddit.nlOPEnglish
      0·
      27 days ago

      Nice, seems viable!
      Does immich also take care of taking the pictures from iCloud and then remove them?

      • biomechLulu@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        27 days ago

        AFAIK, not yet. I think they are working on adding the “free up space” capability but I think that may only remove them from the device not the cloud. However, I am on Android so not sure how that would work for iCloud. If you can’t find the answers in their documentation, you can search or ask in their discord channel.

      • HybridSarcasm@lemmy.worldMEnglish
        1·
        27 days ago

        Not from iCloud, just from the phone’s local storage. So, to backup all of iCloud from the phone, those photos would have to be downloaded to the phone first.

        Alternatively, you can download all the photos from iCloud to a computer, then upload those photos manually to the Immich web interface.

  • hperrin@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    27 days ago

    I’ve been using Immich for a while now. It is amazing. Better than iPhotos and Google Photos.

    One thing to note is that your photos are stored on disk unencrypted, so if anyone has access to your server, they have access to your photos. This can be partially mitigated with LUKS or some other full disk encryption, but unless you configure it with TPM, your server won’t be able to come up automatically.

    • reddwarf@feddit.nlOPEnglish
      0·
      27 days ago

      Seems Immich is quite popular and also seems like something I could start to use.
      If only we could point the Photos app to Immich or have Immich download and remove images which are older and could be moved to Immich.

      • hperrin@lemmy.caEnglish
        1·
        27 days ago

        Immich does have a command line uploader, and you can download photos 1000 at a time from the iCloud website. It’s an extremely tedious process, especially when your mom has 130,000 photos to migrate, and she’s not techie enough to do it herself.

        • reddwarf@feddit.nlOPEnglish
          0·
          27 days ago

          Understood.
          And please accept my belated sympathy for your endeavor with your mom’s Library of Congress sized photo album vault, that must have been tiring.

          • hperrin@lemmy.caEnglish
            1·
            27 days ago

            Thanks. It took about 10 minutes to do each set of 1000 photos, because she wanted to keep both the originals and the modified versions, so 2000 individual per 1000 photos. It took roughly 22 hours to do them all, which I did over the span of about four days. I never want to do that again! xD

  • powermaker450@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    1·
    27 days ago

    Immich full stop, like everyone else has said. self hostable so as much storage as you can buy (and maintain backups of!), AI so you can search your photos like “sunset on beach”, and just rock solid, despite it “”“technically”“” still in pre-release stage

    • reddwarf@feddit.nlOPEnglish
      1·
      27 days ago

      Immich seems a real good option! And I am starting to believe that moving pictures from iCloud to another solution to free up space might have to involve another type of system/service unfortunately. Also seems that the Photos app on the iPhone has no options to use something else as storage, it uses local storage and iCloud storage.