One of the biggest difficulties for me is moving from Apple Photos. The phone app, Mac desktop app and cloud all work really well together.

I have a Synology with Synology Photos but the connection is poor externally and it is hard to view photos on 4G/5G. Also many editing features are missing. It is good for backing up at home but not practical on the road as uploads are too slow.

I don’t really want to use Google Photos cloud for obvious reasons.

Has anyone found a solution where you can sync your phone, desktop and cloud all at the same time?

Shame there is now Live Photos on Android as well. These motion photos on Android don’t really work that well.

    GI1

    I’ve been researching this myself and narrowed down to using syncthing or cryptomator (combined with Dropbox or proton drive or skiff drive)

      bayesian thanks for the suggestion. Yes I have heard of this one but on the pricey side as I would need 2TB plan. I could maybe use a temporary backup and then transfer to a hard drive. It would be good to store my entire collection

      bayesian do you use a personal cloud on a NAS? My issue is the Synology backup of photos does not work well and very slow

        GI1 I host my own NextCloud server and use LibrePhotos with it.

        • GI1 likes this.

        GI1 do you use a personal cloud on a NAS?

        I am a minimalist. I have a single powerful notebook and I don't want to be maintaining personal machines all over the place. I upload it to Proton Drive.

        applesbana Can you share what you use for encryption?

        full disk encryption with Veracrypt or LUKS

          Syncthing works well for this, depending on your needs. You can easily sync your camera roll (or anything else) to a workstation or server, with a 2-way (default) or 1-way sync relationship. It's open source, decentralized, and all transfers are end-to-end encrypted. There are Syncthing clients for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, BSD, and iOS.

          Shares are 2-way synced by default, so any files that are modified or removed on either end will be mirrored to all hosts on the share (removing a photo on the mac will remove it from your phone, etc.). If you opt for a 1-way sync, you can choose to have the phone ignore any changes that occur on the mac side.

          bayesian I can second ente. Been using it for a week now - I used an old iphone to backup all my icloud photos and it's been working pretty seamlessly since. Understandable that it'd be too expensive for 2TB of photos though.

            10 days later

            AtriumCompound Looking into Ente - looks to be a good service.

            I'm currently using Nextcloud for my photo storage but using LibrePhotos for the front end. Librephotos is pretty good!
            There are some challenges with this approach: my wife has an IOS device and getting photos from her into nextcloud-librephotos is manual. I need to manually upload photos from my phone and/or her google photos into nextcloud... She can only access my photos via a browser... and of course - there is manual effort to keep nextcloud-librephotos running (though I'd keep Nextcloud regardless).

            In what you have seen from Ente so far - could it go as far as completely replacing my wife's google photos as well as my nextcloud/librephotos instance?

            Also - the most important question is regarding privacy/security... any thoughts there?

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