this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2025
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32
Need a self hosted solution to offload old Photos's from iPhones to make space in iCloud for new ones (feddit.nl)
submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
40 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

icloudpd can be run in a container or just your host machine. It's a little finnicky to get logins set up (and honestly I haven't done it in a few months), but once that is working you can automate a job to pull down a backup every day/week/month and delete files from icloud.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Thanks, I will take a look!
Am I right in thinking this will get you the photos but it is up to you to place them somewhere and put a service/app in front of that storage to make it usable? Usable as is; the family members can all access their own photos and view them as if it was on the Photos app from Apple?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Right, this is for the “hard” part of getting your content out of iCloud in an automated fashion. You’d then put the content in storage locally and use photoprism or immich or a similar self hosted gallery to be able to access them

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Aha! I'm starting to get the picture. icloudpd to download to my server and Immich (or something like that) to use these downloaded images.

Oh boy, this is not going to be a 1-click whambalam fix is it? 😃

Ah well, gives me something to do and look into, it can be considered fun as well of course!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Correct but there are really only 2 parts (3 if you’re adding a front-facing proxy which it sounds like you know how to do). If you’re using something like truenas or proxmox there are prebuilt containers for both iCloudpd and immich/photoprosm/whatever and even if not both have generic Docker containers or can be run out of their own repo checkout. So you just need:

  1. iCloud <—> local folder via icloudpd
  2. local folder <—> local web front end with immich
  3. local web <—> public web with your proxy or cloudflare setup

Good luck!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

Exactly as I had it in my head atm!
This setup is very clear to me and doable. Thanks for all your help and suggestions!