Sorry this isn't a helpful answer but over in Android-land, Syncthing does exactly this for me right now. I paired Syncthing with a script that pushes any new photos to a self-hosted gallery. It's as fast if not faster than Google Photos and totally independent of any Google ecosystem. Add another offsite Syncthing machine and now you have a magical offsite backup.

This is something I really want, but I've never been quite sure how to set it up properly. Ideally I'd want to run it in the cloud so I don't have to be on my home network (and don't have to expose my home network in that way). I have a VPS that I use for a variety of things, but it doesn't have enough space for my photos. Syncthing doesn't seem to support S3 as storage.

I suppose I could put it on a machine at home, and expose it to the internet (perhaps using Wireguard), but I have very limited upload bandwidth (25Mbps), and would still want to sync the files to S3 (say with a script that runs nightly). I guess the initial sync would take forever, and then new photos would be relatively quick.

I guess I could also put it on my VPS and use something like Amazon's NFS service as the backing store. But I expect that would be quite a bit more expensive than the lower-cost S3/Glacier tiers I'd prefer to use.

With that kind of upload speed, I can see why you'd want cloud hosting. I'm paranoid enough to want a local copy so my first instinct is to still sync to home with an inotify script to trickle-push everything to S3 (quicker to start than a nightly script).

I use photo sync for this, which was a one off payment. Of course you have to trigger it manually every few days because only Apple apps can actually work on iOS

https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do... works great for me to do this.

I'll give this a shot, thank you!

> Could you really expect a company to justify the kind of work

Well they certainly justified it to support their own first-party service just fine. So... yes?

So the parent got flagged after I did the math. I hope you don't mind my posting it here just to qualify what the justification looks like:

The exaggerated use-case:

0.0000000001% is:

0.000000000001 (10^-12)

Multiplied by 1,460,000,000

----

0.00146 persons.

And we already know that there are at least 2 people (myself and parent up there) who are interested in that. This is off by a factor of 1000. I'm willing to guess that it's actually off by a factor of at least 1,000,000, possibly 10,000,000. It seems completely reasonable to me that we could find in the entire world of iPhone users 146,000 people who would want to setup their own photos backup.

All of this is simply to say that the user base is absolutely massive, and we need to appreciate how huge it is. Even a very very small subset of users represents a very large number of actual people.

[1] https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/number-of-iphone-users (further upstream sources are provided there)

Take a look at icloudpd. I’ve been running it as a container for couple of years now and it’s been sync’ing photos down from my iphone to my NAS.

https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...

I tried that but the downloads time out for me a few hundred in, and the nature of the script is such that it doesn’t auto restart or crash but it hangs and needs manual interactive intervention.

I'm running it in a container. So I haven't noticed any such issues. Other than having to re-authenticate every few weeks. The container itself is configured to auto restart on failures. But I'll keep an eye on it. Maybe it is failing and I just never noticed it. But I do see that my NAS has the latest images and videos downloaded. So at least as a container, its working as advertised.