If you have a Mac, then "Image Transfer" is what you are looking for. It allows to simply sync fotos and images as their raw files (original quality if so configured) to a directory.
From there you can do whatever you want with them (put them on multiple separate disks, upload them to galleries, strip jpg and distribute them etc.
You do miss out on face detection, but stuff like 'locations' can be easily done with the GPS data in the EXIF, just loop through your files and rip the details out of EXIF, store in DB and make a little interface for it et voila.
But yes, in the end, I would love to be able to say "store my shit at X" where X is my private colocated box, while still using apple's pretty cool photo management services. Till then (which will never come ;) ) I just have the small 3CHF/month plan which gives 200GiB, which is good enough for 'the best photos of the last few months'.
PS: Indeed, one has to plug the phone into the computer and then do the copy/sync, but that also gives on the moment to run iTunes for a full backup, always a good idea just in case stuff breaks/goes-missing/etc.
The Image Capture application (probably previously named Image Transfer) will not preserve Albums and Favorites as far as I can tell.
Anyways, as mentioned I bought the third-party backup protocol speaking application after this unfortunate event, the application which is able to transfer the data into folders based on the albums and favorites that I have on the phone. But I appreciate the comment nonetheless.
Best of luck to you! I hope everything works out well for you!
On an aside, does anyone know whether tools like Resilio Sync are still an option? I've used that to backup my photo library from my iPhone to a local server for years, is this still a viable option? Currently doing full-device backups, but retrieval is a hassle, and I routinely take work-related photos (whiteboards) that I can't upload to iCloud.
Sorry to hear about your financial struggles. I hope things work out.
Features:
License purchase page:
Right now I'm using DS File from Synology to transfer photos to my NAS and from there there's a script [1] that organizes it into a destination folder which is then synced to Dropbox and Google Photos simultaneously. So I get to use Google Photos as my primary photo viewer but it's just essentially a cached copy of my library (which I could trash and restore at any point).
I have a series of blog posts [2] about my setup.
[1] https://github.com/jmathai/elodie
[2] https://medium.com/vantage/understanding-my-need-for-an-auto...
The script doesn't make many assumptions so you can get it to do pretty much anything (i.e. I wrote a plugin to have it upload a copy of every photo to Google Photos).
Here's an example of how you could get it to do what you asked if you were using Synology.
1. Use DS File's Photo Backup option to automatically sync photos from your phone to your Synology.
2. Have a scheduled task on your Synology to process photos in the synced folder to your destination folder. (I have this run every minute - it's cheap, I'm impatient, it's worked for years)
3. (optional) Configure Cloud Sync to sync the destination folder to Dropbox/Google Drive/etc. (Now you've got 2 geographically distributed copies of your archive and each supports versioning)
I'm on the fence between something diy like freenas, or more packaged like a synology. It's got to work for people on macs with small ssds who aren't interested in command lines, writing apps, or other techie level stuff. They just want to be able to find photos in a 20 year archive.
I don't know if photos will work with a library mounted on the remote drive, time machine has always been a bit touchy on the old machine over wifi. On the other hand, I'm not sure I trust the synologys if I can't pull the drives and read them elsewhere when things go wrong.
> I'm not sure I trust the synologys if I can't pull the drives and read them elsewhere when things go wrong.
Synology drives are easily mountable using mdadm + lvm.
After cancelling my iCloud 2TB plan, and turning iCloud off for photos I learned that being able to transfer photos off of my phone is not so easy.
Because basically Apple wants you to use iCloud for your photos or to sync between your computer and your phone. But I take a lot of photos as well as long videos and heaps and heaps of screenshots from articles that I read. The internal SSD on my MacBook Air is only 128GB, so I had to resort to an external drive. With huge amounts of images and photos in a Photos library macOS keeps wanting to scan through all of them and it spends forever to do so.
I began creating new Photos libraries but at that point Photos libraries begin to feel rather pointless. In order to find photos I’d have to sift through multiple libraries and each of them would want to scan the whole library again.
Aside from that the big annoyance with importing into Photos (instead of syncing) is that it does not transfer albums and favorites, it only transfers the media files.
So I was manually selecting photos and organizing stuff but that takes time so I put off transferring photos and videos and screenshots from my phone for a couple of months.
Very recently I finally found an application for macOS that uses the iPhone backup protocol in order to transfer whole albums and favorites. But it cost $60 so I was hesitant to buy it because I was very low on money so it was a significant amount. Instead I started doing a full backup of the device. About 30% through the process my phone goes in to a reboot loop.
I speak with an Apple store, I speak with Apple and I speak with a data recovery specialist company. The data recovery specialist company told me that from the description I was giving them about what had happened, it was highly probable that data had been corrupted and that this would make it impossible to recover anything. They could have a look at it for a fee of $150 they said, and recovery if possible would cost between $400 and $1000. Naturally this was way above what I could afford. So I went through with factory reset on my own instead, which means accepting that the data was gone.
I lost a couple of months worth of photos and videos and screenshots. Which sucks. At the same time though, nothing much exciting happened in these months anyway so it’s not a disaster either. But I would have preferred to not lose the data because there were a select few memories in there from that time that would have been nice to keep.
I am also growing worried about my data in general, as the drives I use are starting to age. I can’t afford new drives at the moment but began looking at renting storage from Hetzner.
Anyways, in terms of what’s on the phone I now have iCloud photos turned back on on the 5GB plan and try to transfer regularly using the macOS third-party application that I mentioned. After losing the data on my phone I shelled out those $60 for said application. It’s still a bit more cumbersome of a procedure compared to storing more in iCloud but at the same time I think this is pretty ok. This way, as long as I keep transferring to my computer when iCloud is full I always have the photos transferred or they are in iCloud. And then after I transfer them to the compute I delete them from the phone.
Ironically as I am typing this I ran out of storage again earlier today, but I am going to transfer the photos and videos that are currently on my phone as soon as I get home. And if my phone should misbehave again, or I lose the phone or whatever, well at least this time it’s a few hours worth of data that I am losing and not a couple of months worth.