Comment by zerof1l
4 years ago
This story should serve as a warning and a motivation to move away from iCloud, Google Cloud, and alike for video and photo storage. The easiest thing is to just purchase a drive or NAS and store your media on it. If you're a bit tech-savvy, you can run your own NextCloud. I run NextCloud on Hetzner, 1TB storage box + web server for a total of $7 a month. Or you can get Hetzner to run the NextCloud for you for about $4.7 a month for 1TB storage, but then you don't have full control over it. Then there are quite nice NextCloud apps for Android and iOS that you can configure to sync your photos and videos into your cloud.
> 1TB storage box
hah, we're a hetzner costumer for .. years now, but I had no idea they have this :D
https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box
so you can connect the NextCloud to the storage account? which protocol do you use for this?
Not OP, but I also use Hetzner and their storage boxes. Servers I use will connect using samba. For temporary access from other devices I usually use FTPS, but they also offer a bunch of other protocols.
It's a limited SSH, so you can use rsync and Borg for backup. You can also use Samba to connect to it. So I think nextcloud would work with samba.
Can NextCloud do OCR on the pictures, identify people and allow search by objects in the photo? Because those are the killer features for me that make it super useful to use Google photos.
Yes. https://github.com/marcelklehr/recognize I run Nextcloud on a Raspberry PI running yunohost.org for all my family.
Sort of...not well. There is an app for NextCloud called Recognize [1].
It has gotten significantly better in the last year or so, but it's still pretty bad and pretty slow.
[1] https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/recognize
You might want to check out something like https://photoprism.app/
I bet that the accuracy and user experience are nowhere as good as Google Photos. Which is sad.
No you see that requires work when most people would rather complain.
It's such a shame because having these services be healthy and popular benefits everyone.
I am a software professional and run my own email and it's a massive pain in the ass. I started also using a google account just to use for all the stupid sign ups the internet makes you do, and use my real email for actual correspondence, banking, and a few other things only.