Google confirms its latest update can scan all your photos to “use actual images of you and your loved ones” in AI image generation. That means Gemini seeing who you know and what you do. You likely have tens or hundreds of thousands of photos. They’re all exposed if you update.
If you’re able to manage a Docker container, you could consider Immich. It works great, has client apps for iOS and Android. Open Source. I’ve been using it for a few years now.
https://github.com/immich-app/immich
The main reason why I haven’t moved to Immich is backups. Storage is Hella expensive and there’s no way I store photos without a backup.
Backblaze B2 is about $7 a month per TB.
Almost every major backup solution natively supports S3 compatible storage.
$7/month per TB is expensive as a data hoarder…
Best to scope it down to documents, git and photos.
The rest gets an onsite backup to externals.
Obviously cloud storage is convenient, but there’s definitely better value in on-site backups.
That works out to $84/year, which is about what you could get a 1TB HDD for.
2 x 1TB HDDs in RAID will be much cheaper and reasonably safe in the long run.
1TB SSDs will be even better value due to their extended lifespans, and you’d get much better speeds.
I back up to local storage and then replicate offsite to S3 nightly.
On-prem backups are great and cheap and fast and definitely plan A but a robust backup solution is going to require offsite storage of some sort. Object storage is one of the cheapest ways to do that for most situations, particularly for things that can’t be replaced like photos.
I’d do the same if I wasn’t so tight with my money lol. I prefer having multiple on-site backups so I don’t have the subscription fees.
If something bad enough happens to my house that it destroys all my backups then I imagine photos are not going to be very high on my list of priorities.
Same, I set it up a few years ago and both me and my partner have been using it since then with no issues at all, it’s completely replaced Google Photos for us.
We’ve also set up immich-frame and repurposed an old Google Nest hub to use as a digital photo frame.
I’ve written a python script that fetches a random image from an immich album using its API, every 30 seconds and sets it as my media pc (Ubuntu) wallpaper. Serves as a frame when no windows are open. Recently updated the code to fetch images only when the desktop has mouse focus, to save unnecessary HDD reads when I’m watching something.
Immich-frame has been on my todo list for a while. Need to get on that.
Not that difficult to setup either. If I can do it anyone with a keyboard can.
It was my first ever Docket app, and it was brain dead easy.