I’ve been using Immich. It has been getting better with every update.
Surprised to see this is the only suggestion of immich in this thread, it’s great
Android ftp apps never work. It’s also a huge pain and borderline impossible on some distros to get mtp over usb cable to work and even when it does work it barely works. Most phones don’t have an sdcard slot so you can’t go that route either. And I’m definitely not using Google drive because they’ve on purpose tried to make it impossible to go any route other than that and fuck Google.
My solution? I made a php page with a file upload so I have to upload my files via php. It’s the only way. It’s still easier than using the USB cable if it actually worked though. Luckily there’s no way Google will ever find a way to patch this out.
Transferring files to the phone involves using the same upload button just from a pc and then I download them from the “view uploaded files” button which is a page that autogenerates download links to a page.
Weird, for me mtp or Syncthing work pretty well. But mtp not for big archives or multiple folders, true. So syncthing with global discovery disabled.
Nextcloud. Auto uploads any new files from specified directories to my server.
Nextcloud app. It works alright.
On iOS it’s a different story though… (my wife has an iPhone)
I used nextcloud as well, switched to Immich when I got an iPhone though
Can I ask what doesn’t work with Nextcloud to your expectations? Just sounded like “works alright” implies something is off from what you’d like. I am asking because I have recently set this up for myself and haven’t noticed any issues yet. Well apart from a recent issue with one of the latest app updates crashing those auto uploads.
The sync on Android itself is pretty stable. Every now and then it throws errors about not being able to sync but those could be because of bad reception.
The Nextcloud app on Android has another weird error for me. It doesn’t show the content of a notification (like “Update for app xyz available”) but “NEXTCLOUD_NOTIFICATION”. I tried to resolve it using different approaches from the internet but it followed me even to a new phone. I just gave up for the time being.
The sync with iOS is somewhat bad. To get all the images from my wife’s phone to the cloud I have to plug it in, deactivate screen timeout, and open the app. Sync will stop once I close the app.
Last but not least compared to iCloud/Google Photos watching and browsing the photos on a device is just way slower. I understand why that is but in the end it’s just an annoyance making the switch harder for people in my family. They understand why I am passionate about selfhosting and privacy but they still have a reasonable expectation that things just work.
All in all nothing really severe. Little annoyances along the way. I am still quite happy with the solution all in all.
They understand why I am passionate about selfhosting and privacy but they still have a reasonable expectation that things just work.
That’s somewhat where my head is at too at the moment. I do want to go the privacy route but I do also want something where it can “just work” (hence why I’m looking closely at third party solutions like entee and filen or proton drive). I do care about privacy, but having all the creature comforts that companies like Google has provided is still a bit difficult to let go.
Sync will stop once I close the app.
This is an iOS limitation, so no going around that unfortunately.
Thanka for elaborating so detailed! I can mirror your concerns, seeing mostly the same issues like slow browsing of images. But overall I am ok with this too.
Termux and rsync
I use foldersync and sftp
Syncthing.
App on the phone and host on the server.
But syncthing deletes images when they are deleted on the phone right? I just tried it, and this is what seems to happen. Is there a way to set it up such that I can delete things on my phone, but they won’t be deleted on the server?
Yup, it’s not a good solution.
Look into Foldersync, PhotoSync, Nextcloud, Immich. They all work how you would expect where photos are backed up, and you can then remove them from your device if needed.
Rsync
I fairly recently setup FolderSync to monitor my pictures folders and sync them to my server via ssh as soon as new images show up. I then set it up to sync everything else on the device on a schedule.
I’m using ssh, but you can sync between any folders through ssh, ftp, smb, dropbox, google drive, and many other cloud services. Local>cloud, cloud>cloud, cloud>local, and even bi-directional.
I heard good things about immich
I use self-hosted Immich with their Android app. You can also use PhotoPrism with PhotoSync.
Synology Photos.
