iPhone 16PM, Photo's and a NAS

[Boeingfan]

Hi All,

After my own recent experience, I'd like to field advice, help, or ideas from similar users who have an iPhone, use the Photo's app, and utilise a NAS.

Firstly, context; my iPhone 14 PM 512gb had its capacity maxed out as I take a lot of photo's due to recent relocation, renovations, etc..

First plan: Given my photo's were already backed up to my NAS, I deleted them from my iPhone in order to free up storage on my iPhone. Great huh? Well, yes and no.

• Yes; I achieved the outcome of freeing up the storage space on my iPhone.
• No; I quickly realised that I'd lost the functionality of the Photo's app, such as text searching, facial and other object recognition. Damn you. The Synology NAS Photo's app is abysmally incapable, compared to Apple Photo's.

So now I had an empty camera roll apart from the most recent new snaps I'd taken, and had to get all of those photo's back onto my phone.

Second plan: Now that I had my fabulous new 1TB 16PM, I ticked the box in iTunes telling it to sync photo's from the folder containing all of my old camera roll photo's. Did that work?

• Yes, I now had all the photo's back on my iPhone and was able to peruse them in the Photo's app.
• No; what I didn't know, is that by using this method, Photo's no longer allows you to delete photo's, such as duplicates, from the iPhone, as they are from a synchronised source. This means you must delete them from the NAS. What a pain in the A$$.

Third plan: A mate suggested I accept defeat and use iCloud Photo's. I wasn't clear on how this would pan out, but I gave it a shot. I turned iCloud Photo's on, and received a popup that the 9,000 odd photo's I'd spent time transferring to my phone were about to be deleted. Fine, whatever, just get the pain over with. Did this work?

• Unknown: I'm still uploading the 2,000 photo's I've used as the test batch.

I love the iPhone Photo's app and its capabilities, so I just want to retain my photo's on my iPhone Photo's app, and simply back them up to my NAS.

Has anyone else had similar experiences, and if so, what did you do? How did you get to a place you're happy with?

 

[FreakinEurekan]

iCloud Photos offers significant functional benefits, as you've seen. Main question is: Do you have a Mac? If no then.... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ not sure what to tell you.

What I'm doing, is syncing all my devices (3 Macs, iPhone, and iPad) to iCloud. All my photos are "Visible" everywhere. I did have a NAS at home but it was a Drobo, who of course are out of business now, so I replaced it with a local disk on the one Mac mini that was really the primary user of the NAS in the first place; so performance is better to boot. That one mini is set to "Download and Keep Originals" of photos from iCloud - all the other devices are "Optimize." So ALL of my photos & videos from iCloud, are physically stored on that external drive in that Mac's photos library.

That is not a "Backup" of course - if I delete a photo or video from ANY device, it'll delete from there too. But - it enables a local backup. I have a daily backup of that library both to Time Machine and to a 3rd party cloud backup, so all my photos & videos are safe.

This solution has its drawbacks... mainly in that photos & videos on my phone or iPad are mostly "In the cloud" with just the thumbnails stored locally. Not a big deal at all as long as I have a solid 5G connection, which is frankly "most of the time." For me, the drawbacks are outweighed by the benefits; but your mileage may vary.

I would LOVE to see Apple offer a "Certified" backup solution of iCloud Photos and iCloud Drive, which would eliminate the need for "Download and keep originals" and, frankly, the need for a Mac at all. The way I envision it, is that you choose your 3rd party cloud backup vendor who can then directly back up your data from iCloud, without having to download it to an intermediate device first. But for now, that's just a hope.

 

[gigapocket1]

eeeek. Photos app on Mac would definitely be faster and easier.
I’ve been searching and trying to figure out a way to get away from Apple photos myself.
the closest I’ve come is an app called immich. it then crashed after days of uploading and setting up. I resorted to just use iCloud for now.

 

[ManuCH]

I tried tons of endless things along the line of what OP did. In the end, I settled with iCloud photos. I have all my photos since 2014 synced there (65'000 photos and 1500 videos). Anything else just wouldn't cut.

I still don't like the fact that there's no automated (API-based) way of backing iCloud photos up to a NAS. I do it semi-manually, by using an Automator script, and that works kinda fine.

In my opinion, whatever you do, make sure you have a backup. iCloud is not a backup, and if Apple were to lose your data, it's gone.

For me, iCloud Photos would be perfect if they did the following 2 changes:

• create an API that allows third party apps to access it and perform backups
• change the way syncing to devices work, and make it more similar to Google Photos. With Google Photos, the moment you open the app, all your stuff is there and it's kinda "streamed in real time". Setting up iCloud Photos on a new device with a huge library? It syncs literally for days. That's super annoying.

Of course I could switch to Google Photos, but nope, not doing that. I just don't trust their privacy stance - but most importantly, I don't trust their continuity. Google is known to discontinue products randomly, and I don't wanna be forced to switch.

 

[Ipadonly1]

I tried tons of endless things along the line of what OP did. In the end, I settled with iCloud photos. I have all my photos since 2014 synced there (65'000 photos and 1500 videos). Anything else just wouldn't cut.

I still don't like the fact that there's no automated (API-based) way of backing iCloud photos up to a NAS. I do it semi-manually, by using an Automator script, and that works kinda fine.

In my opinion, whatever you do, make sure you have a backup. iCloud is not a backup, and if Apple were to lose your data, it's gone.

For me, iCloud Photos would be perfect if they did the following 2 changes:

• create an API that allows third party apps to access it and perform backups
• change the way syncing to devices work, and make it more similar to Google Photos. With Google Photos, the moment you open the app, all your stuff is there and it's kinda "streamed in real time". Setting up iCloud Photos on a new device with a huge library? It syncs literally for days. That's super annoying.

Of course I could switch to Google Photos, but nope, not doing that. I just don't trust their privacy stance - but most importantly, I don't trust their continuity. Google is known to discontinue products randomly, and I don't wanna be forced to switch.

Sounds like a cool system using the Automator script, but would you really not trust iCloud Photos as a backup? I personally just can’t see Apple losing my iCloud data. Should I be more cautious?

 

[ManuCH]

Sounds like a cool system using the Automator script, but would you really not trust iCloud Photos as a backup? I personally just can’t see Apple losing my iCloud data. Should I be more cautious?

As a matter of principle, I never trust a single place to put my data (also, iCloud is a cloud storage, not a backup, by definition). Apple could have an issue (it's a 1 in a billion chance, but I'm not taking that chance), or more likely, I could have an issue (some malware deleting all my pictures, who knows, and then having to contact Apple to revert the deletion - good luck with that).

I live along the "3-2-1 backup strategy" (explained here for example). It may be overkill, but my photos are the single most important data set I own, so I'm not taking any chances.

My main repository is iCloud photos. It's all also backed up to my NAS. Then I have my old NAS in the basement to which the main NAS is mirrored (with versioning). And I also backup my NAS to an additional cloud storage.

It's all set up in a way that even if disaster strikes, my photos (as well as my main documents) should be reasonably safe.

This may really well over the top for most non-nerds 😂 but I definitely recommend everyone to not use iCloud photos exclusively (if only to have a failsafe in case of user error). A manual backup every now and then, maybe to an external SSD, is more than enough.