I am moving away from the Apple ecosystem, but I still haven’t figured out a way to handle my photos. I used to have photos on my phone, my laptop, and an external drive for older photos, all handled by Apple Photos.
I got rid of Apple Photos and am trying Immich. My problem is that Immich won’t start unless the hard drive containing the older photos is plugged in. Apple Photos could do this and just show a thumbnail if the picture was missing. So that means that I cannot look at my own photos unless I am at home with that backup hard drive (usually hidden for safety) plugged in. That’s a bummer.
Manually retrieving photos from my phone, I can deal with, but this is a bit of a deal-breaker and people at Immich seems to say that this is just the way it is designed.
How do you guys handle this? I do not plan to get a NAS and I do not want to have my photos constantly plugged into a home server. I also do not need remote access to any of the photos – it’s just that I want to check my current photos whenever I want.
Thank you, but not only is this the first thing I looked, but it also doesn’t answer my issue at all. For one, I have way too many pictures for this, but also I am not interested in having my pictures in the cloud and to pay for that service. Local management is best.
Interesting, I will look it up, thank you. Any reason this is not recommended by PrivacyGuides? I mean, some of the criteria does not apply if this is purely local, but otherwise, anything to consider?
You don’t want a normal solution to the problem. No cloud, no NAS, which is what is typically recommended. So you want something very custom that likely does not even exists but still you wonder why there is no recommended solution. Well simply because you are asking for something unusual.
Also I have to make clear that if you use what you call a hard drive as main storage, it ain’t a backup. By the sounds of it, if that drive crashes you lose all your photos?
I would urge you to go for the conventional route. Also I am sure Ente can tailor for your storage needs, if if it is bigger than their subscription offering, just reach out to them when you get close to the limit.
It’s not really that I want to exclude products that have it, but, correct me if I am wrong, Ente Photos seems mostly geared for online storage and multi-device access – it does not seem like it is meant to generally store pictures locally and, if needed, have them on the cloud, like Apple Photos. It is first and foremost a cloud-based solution. I could be wrong but that is my impression from their website, so it really does not seem like a replacement for Apple Photos.
Call me old-fashioned, but to me a cloud, a NAS, or even a server-based software is not necessarily the norm here. I handle my backups locally, on multiple hard drives, and do not need to have extra online storage.
Basically, all I need is a photo library that works locally and that will still work when some photos are not available. That seems to me like a rather normal solution, not a very custom one. It’s something that Apple Photos does naturally on mac. And I used to have the same for Windows way back when. So it very much does exist and for sure was the only thing available until not so long ago.
So I really appreciate the help, but the focus here is not to ensure backups or anything – I have that taken care of. All I need is something where I can see my pictures, organise them with folders and albums, and, perhaps, have some face recognition or things like this. Even that is optional.
