I used to use Google Photos. And Apple photos. And Flikr. And God knows what other services. And I paid. Paid a monthly subscription for all of them. But then, I decided - what a hell!
So I started to bring all my photos back offline. It took me a while, but thanks to Google, Apple and Flickr - they offer this kind of option to bulk download all your digital assets.
So now I have an external 2Tb HDD + I bought an additional 1 Tb SSD to my main PC and have all my archive of photos there.
It's still unsorted, or should I say partially sorted, with lots of duplicates, because during last years I was switching from iPhone to Android (and even back for some short time, while my Android phone was in the repair shop). And I still own both iPhone as a backup phone and lovely iPad Mini.
So what I wanted to have is a Google Photo replacement free download no adds no registration no monthly subscription how many SEO specialists you need to replace a lightbulb.
I drafted some major requirements of how I wanted it to work:
Over the air backups from phone(s) to computer
I want my photos to be backed up from my phone (both Android and iPhone) over the air securely to some location, so in case if my phone breaks I won't care about lost photos
Two-way sync
I want a two-way sync, i.e. if I delete some photos from my phone I want them to disappear from all my other devices - computer, tablets, whatever is configured. Or if I have some spare time to sort out photos on my computer, and I delete something, I want that to be deleted on phone as well.
This requirement is bit controversial, if it's not implemented properly. It means that I have to have a full copy of all my photos on my all devices - phone, iPad, computer. Otherwise if something will be missing in one place, this gap should be processed by sync process:
- either to delete the same files on other devices
- or to bring them back to this device
Having full copy of all photos is not a problem for SBC, as we can attach bigger SD card or even multi-Tb HDD to it. But it is a problem for mobile devices, which are limited in their storage.
To overcome this negative side effect we will be syncing just last year worth of photos. I think every mobile device can handle that amount of photos. It means that if you'll be running out of space on your phone, you can easily delete photos and videos older than year ago, and this your deletion will not be propagated to other devices.
Jumping ahead, this is where you can do this in FolderSync:
Implementation
This was quite easy. On my Orange PI 4 LTS (can't stop showing off ;-) I configured sshd. I also have tor there configured to expose 'tor hidden service' so I can SSH from my phone to my SBC from any remote point of the world
Then on my Android device I also have tor installed. The app is called "Orbot" and it's official Tor client. It's a bit laggish but generally works fine.
Then I installed an app called "Folder Sync". If you know about any open-source android app like that - let me know. Folder Sync has a free version with adds and it works quite well for our purposes. I have configured Folder Sync to connect to my tohostnamef8j28jfh9jfjh7sdhf2.onion:2222 and sync couple of Android folders (with camera pictures and screenshots) to appropriate folders on my SBC. It works just great, but slow.
When I am at home and my phone can use home WiFi I also configured few other sync pairs with the same folders, thanks to FolderSync flexibility, but this time they will only trigger when my phone sees my WiFi SSID - so when I'm at home it reaches to my server without Tor. This thing is optional, and I did that just to check how flexible FolderSync is. You can skip this.
TODO
If the connection speed over the internet is not enough (because of using Tor), I probably have to back off and configure a tunnel using Cloudflare.
Setup and configure few web services to act as online gallery. Candidates are:
- Photoprism
- Piwigo
- Lychee
- Plex
- Librephotos
- Nextcloud
Some of them can even do the sync.
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