Hey Lemmy!
I’m taking the opportunity from migrating away from Reddit to also look at other centralized aspects of my tech life. I dislike how my music was being kept by Apple Music, so now I use a local library managed by MusicBee - the software is like a free, actually good version of iTunes. It also syncs new music to my phone automatically in the ideal format.
But I’m really struggling with photos - it seems like the old photo library design principle is dead, you either get tools for editors or cloud services. Does anybody know a way to simply connect my phone, have pictures transfer to a central library, and then have that library managed locally? I want to see all pictures, sort by date, maybe by place if I’m feeling nostalgic, zoom in… And that’s it. I’m very dumb when it comes to photography so no editing needed, no color balancing - I just want all pictures on the PC, and peripheral devices like phones and cameras to sync to the PC. Is that possible? I don’t mind paying for the software, as long as it’s one purchase and not a subscription. Though as the community might imply, I’d heavily prefer FOSS.
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You could sync your pictures with your PC when they are in the same network.
I keep my devices (phone and tablet) in sync with my PC with Syncthing-Fork for android. This fork has the ability to stay offline most of the time and only come online during specific times, to safe battery.
That method would allow you to sync any new pictures from your phone with your PC once you connect to your local network. Managing and editing the photos would be the next question.
I run an unRAID server and use the PhotoPrism docker to manage my library. PhotoSync on iPhone imports via WebDav to my NextCloud docker (so both NextCloud and PhotoPrism can access pictures).
It’s a project to setup, but once it’s setup it just works, and I own all of my own data.
I use Syncthing for transfering the photos from my phone to my computer and Photoprism to manage the actual photographs. I believe there are better alternatives than Syncthing for photo transfer, but I was already using it, so eh
I also recommend self hosting photoprism.
I recently went through getting all of my photos (tens of thousands) out of Apple’s clutches. For me, the answer was https://photostakeout.com/ to get them all back to my local machine in a reasonable format, and then https://www.digikam.org/ to manage them. The nice thing (for me) is that Digikam runs fine on Mac but will let me migrate easily (I hope!) to Linux when I finally toss this laptop in the river.
As far as syncing, it’s less elegant: connect the device to the laptop, and manually drag the photos over. But I can live with that. Avoiding the big player centralized clouds is important to me. I use https://www.backblaze.com/ to make sure I have an offsite backup of everything, just in case. So rather than the workflow be
Camera => Central Library => Download and manage on laptop
it’s now
Camera => Laptop => background backup to central location
