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I prefer SyncThing on both mobile and desktop devices. It's open source and mature, the server only makes devices findable between each other. It allows 1 or 2
by adr1an 3y ago
I prefer SyncThing on both mobile and desktop devices. It's open source and mature, the server only makes devices findable between each other. It allows 1 or 2 way sync. And it has advanced settings for keeping removed files (e.g. trashbin that cleans anything older than X days.)
- the_common_man 3y agoCan syncthing automatically upload photos?
- newaccount74 3y agoIt worked fine for me on Android to sync my camera folder, but to my knowledge it is not possible to use it for syncing photos on iOS.
- jszymborski 3y agoI love SyncThing and haven't even considered this as a use case! Thanks!
- alexdeloy 3y ago+1 for SyncThing. It (now?) works effortless on my phone and having your screenshots and snapshots automatically on your NAS and PC to process them there is fantastic. Didn't use the "rolling trashbin" feature yet but need to look into that
- WirelessGigabit 3y agoAre you using SyncThing on iOS?
- ASalazarMX 3y agoAFAIK on iOS there's only Möbious Sync, which works well enough considering the restrictions iOS/iPadOS impose. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/m%C3%B6bius-sync/id1539203216 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/m%C3%B6bius-sync/id1539203216
- modeless 3y agoYeah but it doesn't support syncing photos from the camera roll. So you have to use something else to copy photos from the camera roll to the mobius sync folder. I use the PhotoSync app for that, but it's not free and it's not that reliable. And the extra step adds even more latency to the whole pipeline. iOS allows these apps to run in the background only once per day generally, and so it can be several days before photos get all the way synced. If this app can do background sync of the camera roll directly from iOS to an Android device in one step I may switch to it and stop using both Mobius Sync and Photosync.
- yaky 3y agoAFAIK you can use SyncThing-like utilities, like Möbius Sync, on iOS, but not for photos, because… iOS does not consider a photo a file. Which is baffling (probably for some security reason), so I have to stick with a USB cord and ifuse + heif-convert on Linux.
- behnamoh 3y ago> probably for some security reason While I'm sure this is probably true, the number of features Apple is depriving us from due to alleged "security reasons" is baffling. It's a general excuse among firms that want to keep their monopoly and walled garden (OpenAI does the same).
- gcr 3y agoApple provides access to photos just fine, using a different API. Having a separate API for photo access is annoying while developing this use case, but it's appropriate for a couple different reasons: for one, if apps could access the raw files, that could reveal metadata like location. For another, filesystem access wouldn't properly handle cloud-synced photo libraries. Perhaps photos on iOS are persisted into some sqlite-style database on the device rather than as individual files... The Dropbox iOS app would be a good example here. It acts as a ReplicatedFileProvider so apps on the device can access your Dropbox files, but it also provides an optional config flow where users can ask for their photos to be backed up. Then, the Dropbox app fetches the photos through PhotoKit and writes the .JPEGs or .HEICs to a folder of your choosing into your Dropbox files.
- apitman 3y agoThis should be the user's choice, not Apple's. Explain the security tradeoffs then let me do what I want with my device.
- gcr 3y agoThat’s what I mean, there are technical reasons why it doesn’t necessarily make sense to represent photos as individual files: they might not live in a file system, they might have to be downloaded, they might have to be transparently converted from one format to another, they might have to have metadata transparently stripped. Any applications are going to need to use an API to get the right form of photo that the user wants anyway. Having a dedicated API that users can call as they need makes more sense than having the operating system hackishly pretend that your photos live in a bucket of JPEGs somewhere
- barbazoo 3y agoSince this is upvoted so much, I wonder what people's complete setup is for something like this to replace, say, Google Photos. So once the photos are on a "server", what do people recommend for albums, sharing, metadata, geotagging, search, etc?
- bombela 3y agoI personally still use and pay for Google photo. Mostly because I am lazy finding a better solution. As google photo UI is becoming worse overtime, I wouldn't mind an alternative though.
- hiisukun 3y agoI'm not sure it covers all your features listed, but I use PhotoStructure [1] for the 'album' side of things. It's been mentioned a bit on HN, which is where I found it. Sharing is very open for me since I'm just sharing wholesale with family, but when I need to share specific images or albums to people, I usually do it via some other way that suits them -- so if they use messages, email, google drive, dropbox, or just want to download from a webpage (eg. caddy), I'll enable that. I want an easier way to edit the comments on photos (as embedded metadata) that I haven't found yet. Any image browser where I can hit a convenient hotkey, type "Summer 2023 at the river with cousins X and Y" and move on would be great. If anyone has a suggestion I'm listening keenly! If this is built in to something on MacOS or a linux default desktop (like KDE or something I'm less familiar with), or is a small paid non-subscription app, I would buy it. [1] https://photostructure.com/ https://photostructure.com/
- scarface_74 3y agoI have absolutely no desire to manage my own backup. When I take a picture with my phone, it automatically gets backed up to iCloud, Google Photos, OneDrive, and Amazon Photos (free with prime). When I had a personal computer, photos would sync to my computer and get backed up to BackBlaze also.
- crossroadsguy 3y agoIt gets backed up to all of these? On iOS I have tried all except Google and they are all finicky. Even iCloud/Photos.app seems to have a brain of its own. And on the Mac Apple engineers have made sure the photos are not synced in a simple easy folder hierarchy that can be backed up elsewhere.
- bombela 3y ago+1 syncthing too. Over the years it has gotten rock solid for me. I use it between all my machines and phone. With various 1 to many, 1 to 1 and one way or two way sync. One of my machine is always on and is backuped to the cloud everyday. Effectively making a backup of all my devices at once. Better yet, since syncthing can also save staggered copies of modified files, a rm -rf * will be synced but the backup machine will still have copy from about 10s ago. This saved me a few times. Once I realized that I had deleted a file a few months later. And I found it into the syncthing backup, itself within the cloud backup. Very freeing.
- danparsonson 3y agoI just finished setting up an automated backup system with syncthing and restic, and now my phone, laptop, desktop and server are all backed up in several directions and to a cloud storage area, every night. It's glorious and works like a dream. Happy days!
- 8fingerlouie 3y agoI would be very careful when setting up any kind of replication on backup repositories. I much prefer to actually backup to multiple destination, since when replicating, any error will propagate to the synchronized repositories as well, rendering all of the equally useless.
- danparsonson 3y agoGreat advice thanks - I have taken some steps to mitigate that (snapshotting, and a manual weekly USB backup) but you're right, this is an area I should look at more closely.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- BaseballPhysics 3y agoAre you me? This is literally my setup. The one addition is rclone, which I used to back up my (encrypted) restic repos to Drive.
- Saris 3y agoHow do you manage one way sync? IE; deleting photos on your phone without affecting the other side?
- jasonjayr 3y agoYou can set the folder on the PC side to be 'receive only'.
- bombela 3y agoAnd to avoid mishaps, you can also set the phone side to be send only. Do remember that as you delete photos on your phone to save space, it will delete them on the PC. You would need the PC side to move the photos to a different directory (a cronjob would do).
- pmontra 3y agoActually you can setup syncthing not to delete the file in the receiving folder https://docs.syncthing.net/advanced/folder-ignoredelete.html https://docs.syncthing.net/advanced/folder-ignoredelete.html
- ajsnigrutin 3y agoYep, backing up phones (without using cloud, if you don't trust it, and I don't) is a pain... syncthing solves this, by syncing all the photos (and other files you want/need) onto a pc/server, that you can then back up using other solutions.
- Medh_Suk 3y agoI wonder if these services will ever reach mass adoption. I consider myself to be technological advanced, but other than niche photographer, i wonder if 99.99 % of population would ever go through the effort of setting such a service ?
- post-it 3y agoI dream of selling a Box that plugs into the wall that backs up all of your photos and videos and maybe acts as an ActivityPub server, and you can add your friends who also have a Box, and your friends' Boxes back up all of your photos and vice versa. The added benefit of integrating federated social media is that if you want to share a file with your friends, there's zero load time because the file is already backed up on their Box, or it's striped across multiple Boxes and downloads quickly. It would have to be dirt cheap though, like a Chromecast.
- grudg3 3y agoGavin Belson had the right vision after all.
- swaroop 3y agoLike https://umbrel.com/ https://umbrel.com/ ? (no affiliation)
- mulmen 3y agoWow, yes. That. Do you have one?
- rounakdatta 3y agoDamn, this is pretty! I was thinking of self-building such a setup with a Mac Mini.
- mulmen 3y agoHonestly I think Apple has a good model for this. The value would be in making the box plug-and-play. Apple has proven people will pay a premium for devices that Just Work. It could still be built on open software. Some kind of a cross between Apple’s opinionated approach to defaults and RedHat’s pay-for-support model of developing open source software.
- glauber 3y agoHow to backup iCloud photos? I have an iPhone and Windows as desktop.
- crossroadsguy 3y agoThis doesn’t answer your question directly but iCloud is definitely not the way. Not only it’s unreliable and unusable largely, it is also designed in a way that discourage interoperability. On Mac (I am aware you have said Windows) So if I were you I’d just dump app the photos locally in normal folder hierarchies (yes drag and drop; not going hunting in Library folder) and then backup wherever you want them. Here’s something https://support.apple.com/en-in/HT205323 https://support.apple.com/en-in/HT205323. Googled it. Absolutely no idea whether it works or how. Then put something like Dropbox on the job on iOS and it’ll keep uploading your pics and videos which will show up inside one folder on your Windows as well. My point is — you can’t rely on iCloud after you setup your backup up sync strategy. So get all your data at one point then start your parallel backup/sync setup (and maybe leave iCloud on as well if price is not a concern).
- venusenvy47 3y agoI use https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_downloader https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do... running on my NAS to regularly download photos from my wife's iCloud account. The photos are stored in full resolution on iCloud with the EXIF data, unlike Google Photos, so that's nice. The only annoyance is that you need to reauthorize the tool every three months. But it sends you a reminder when the time is coming up.
- goodburb 3y agoBeware that edits, portraits and some custom photo modes aren't currently downloaded. And modifying an edit twice or more will not sync. (no modtime or chksum)
- Cyph0n 3y agoI use PhotoSync on my iPhone.
- JadoJodo 3y agoBut no iOS client
- crossroadsguy 3y agoSomething is absolutely unavailable on iOS. All these other apps I’ve tried just don’t work. I think it’s that mobile operating system’s problem. Probably the devs don’t want to play a game that they know is rigged.
- wanderingmind 3y agoMobiusSync[1], its an iOS client for syncthing. havent tested it myself, but worth giving it a shot [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mobiussync/id1539203216 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mobiussync/id1539203216
- ssss11 3y agoIs there an iOS version?
- abdullahkhalids 3y agoIs it at all possible to backup my phone contacts on my phone using syncthing? Perhaps in conjunction with some other software.
- mehdix 3y agoI use DecSync in combination with Syncthing to achieve that.
- ComodoHacker 3y agoIs it battery-friendly?
- rounakdatta 3y agoIt indeed is. In fact, it's non-invasive, so stubborn OSs like MIUI will unfortunately find ways to block it at times.
- WhrRTheBaboons 3y ago[flagged]
- fletchowns 3y agoI found that SyncThing is not a great solution for the "mobile photo reel" use case. I want my entire photo collection to be easily searchable & accessible from my mobile device, but I don't need a complete copy of my photo reel to be saved to my device. I want to be able to delete things from my phone to free up space, but I want them to still exist in my photo collection that is backed up to the cloud.
- abwizz 3y ago> but I don't need a complete copy of my photo reel to be saved to my device this resonates with me. what solution are you using?
- themk 3y agoI use nextcloud, and it is OK.
- ohthehugemanate 3y agoI have the same need... I use Nextcloud for many things (including photo upload) but I can't stand their photos app. I use photoprism for the photos app and I love it.
- dvdkon 3y agoMaybe you'd like the third-party Memories add-on? By the way, how do you share files between Nextcloud and Photoprism? It's my biggest problem with NC, it's hard to share files with other apps.
- fletchowns 3y agoI just have the same directory mounted to both my Nextcloud & Photoprism containers. They both operate with a normal directory of files on the file system, so I just have them both use the same directory to store data.
- nullwarp 3y ago
- throwaway914 3y agoSyncthing + Tailscale. I have it set to only accept syncs from the tailscale addresses. I use this to do voice recordings that fairly quickly sync home for records of conversations. I'm unclear if Syncthing inherently encrypts transfers, but layering it within Tailscale would add that. No?
- runiq 3y agohttps://docs.syncthing.net/users/security.html#security-principles https://docs.syncthing.net/users/security.html#security-prin...: > All device to device traffic is protected by TLS. To prevent uninvited devices from joining a cluster, the certificate fingerprint of each device is compared to a preset list of acceptable devices at connection establishment. So yeah, transport is encrypted. I do believe they need to put that fact front and center, though. It took me a few minutes to find out. (Thanks for making me find out, though! I use Syncthing heavily and it never occurred to me to even question this.)
- throwaway914 3y agoThanks for finding that. I had the impression syncthing was focused on efficiency only, and not necessarily privacy/encryption. I had the impression a synced copy would be rebuilt from several sources at once, over the syncthing discovery protocol - and may not be encrypted in transit. I can rest easy :)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]