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
this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2025
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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.
I have implemented what you’re looking for using Immich on my wife’s iPhone.
Immich backs up the “Recents” album - which means it backs up everything. What’s important to remember is that it backs it up, not syncs it. This allows me to delete photos from the iPhone and they stay in the Immich library. This is how I keep my wife’s phone from running out of storage.
Works well for us so far, even if I have to manually delete the photos off the phone from time to time.
That is a good method it seems. So Immich has a feature to backup iCloud/Photos files and use these images. If so then deleting is the only thing left. Did you ever consider using icloudpd to do the transfer of files and have that also delete the files in iCloud? That seems like a solution where you are no longer required to manually delete the files anymore.
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!
Nice, seems viable!
Does immich also take care of taking the pictures from iCloud and then remove them?
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.
Thanks!
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.
Thanks!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Immich. Its awesome.
Thanks, this could be a real contender in my search!
ente is pretty great.
This is an interesting one. Seems this one has has the backend and frontend covered. Does ente take the photos from iCloud and then remove them to free up space on iCloud?
I'm not sure they have a way to do that automatically. It's more of an alternative to Google Photos or iCloud.
My wife and I were each running out of space on Google Photos and used Google's takeout function to get all of our pictures from Google and then bulk upload them to my self-hosted ente instance. I'm not sure if/how Apple offers that kind of functionality.
Ok, I understand. How did you manage the pictures taken on phones after the move to ente? Perhaps once in a while bulk transfer them manually? Or perhaps tell the camera app to start using ente (if such a thing is even possible)?
I'm on Android, so I can't speak to how iPhones handle it, but installed the ente app on the phones, pointed it to my instance and picked which folders on the phone to keep backed up.
This isn't necessarily a 1:1 answer for you but it's just what I have experience with: I used Nextcloud for a period of time and set up the app to upload which worked like any basic cloud storage service but what I've done since (I downsized) is just use the PhotoSync app and it's companion on my PC. You can target a PC (like I do), WebDAV, FTP, SMB, etc. which may help with scalability.
I was considering nextcloud but was not sure if it would fit my needs, hence I asked the people here as I have seen a lot of people talk about nextcloud so I wanted to see if their experiences fit my needs.
Is nextcloud taking the pictures from iCloud and then delete them or dou you need to instruct nextcloud to do this or do you need to do that part manually?
Oh no, I don't think it would be able to pull from iCloud directly, I believe there is an option to delete uploaded photos on the iOS device after uploading in the Nextcloud app but I don't know if that is automatic or requires the user to acknowledge a prompt unfortunately.
Ok, thanks. I think that the combo Immich and icloudpd seems to be a way forward for now as that combo seems to be able to download iCloud files to local (my server) and delete them from iCloud. Once on my server I can move them to Immich and that should just about be it. Famous last words, I know, but I think it will be fine.
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.
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?
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
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!
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:
- iCloud <—> local folder via icloudpd
- local folder <—> local web front end with immich
- local web <—> public web with your proxy or cloudflare setup
Good luck!
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!
ICloudpd to get the photos from the cloud.
Photosync app to sync photos to a share. This app is awesome. I think to sync full photos it’s a one time 5$ payment. I’ve synced 70,000 photos and videos so I know it’s worth it.
Does this chain need another service to make the photos 'usable' for all the family members? I am not seeking just a safe place to store photos I will delete from iCloud, these photos are (ideally) also still available to view on the phones of all family members.
Immich!
Seems so! Thanks!
Going from memory, I think the app Immich is often talked about as a server for your own photos. I haven't tried it yet.
Oh, nice combo of tools. May actually be a better approach than Resilio or Syncthing.
Syncthing.
Möbius on iOS, Syncthing on Mac/Linux, SyncTrayzor on Windows, Syncthing-Fork on Android.
Alternatively Resilio Sync.
I do find Resilio works better for iOS - it handles photos better due to iOS restrictions.
Thanks for the suggestions! Like you said in another reply, there does seem to be other options that might be simpler. But still, good to know these tools you mention!