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by storafrid 1788 days ago
Replacing Google Photos with hard drives? What. And replacing Google Drive with a client-based sync tool...? Maybe too high expectations but I was hoping for some level of similar functionality.

Would be interesting to get advice on how an actual user of the Google ecosystem can do this kind of move. There are a lot of applications to research, e.g. Photoprism for replacing Google Photos. A bit overwhelming to review the options and make feature/setup comparisons, considering how many products I use on a daily basis. But it would be nice indeed, to own the data. If the overhead is manageable.
3 comments
vaillancourtmax 1788 days ago
(author here)

Thanks for the feedback!

I realize I wasn't actually using Google Photos, so my recommendation of hard drives likely isn't realistic for most people. TIL about Photoprism, I'll look into it.

For Google Drive, an actual solution for a typical use case would be something like Nextcloud (self-hosted or not, doesn't matter). My own use case was only about sharing a single file between two machines, so Syncthing fit the bill perfectly.

Again, thanks for sharing your thoughts :)

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hanklazard 1788 days ago
To get your data offsite, swap one of your photo drives with a safe deposit box … I think I pay about 50$ per year at BofA. It’s handy for a few bar drives and for critical important docs.
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blakeinate 1787 days ago
My solution ended up being a mix of Backblaze B2 buckets, Nextcloud (linked to B2 using S3 Nextcloud features) and FileBrowser Pro on IOS (which is much faster than Nextcloud for photo upload, links directly to Backblaze). Costs me less than 10 cents a month at this point.
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DavideNL 1774 days ago
Interesting;

I just purchased FileBrowser Pro for my iPad, but after adding my Backblaze B2 bucket i just get an authorization error. Recreated the keys, still not working…

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DavideNL 1774 days ago
…turns out there was a bug which caused it to only work when the Application Key has access to “all vaults”.

The developer replied and provided a workaround the same day… so that’s great support!

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llimos 1787 days ago
I have about 245 GB of photos and videos. I switched to 2 hard drives + pCloud (under $50 a year for 500GB).

It helped that I'd always had the hard drives while still on Google Photos.

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