A few weeks back, I started getting the 99% storage notification from Google Photos, which reminded me that I had a PiGallery server running on my Raspberry Pi that I hadn't used in a while.
Got me thinking about moving away from the dependency on Google photos as a backup server considering a small change in how the countries function would lead to me loosing all my photos overnight.
I knew I was going to self host but the Raspberry PI I had was low in power and running software similar to Google Photos with Face tagging and image processing would overheat it and probably even crash.
There were also things that I had to consider, which led to the PiGallery setup getting left out:
The post might be slightly longer than my usual stuff, so bear with me.
OneDrive / Box / Dropbox:
Self-hosted gallery:
A tool that does it all:
The setup itself is pretty simple if you have already worked with Docker and Docker Compose. If not, you should probably try setting that up locally before setting it up on a server.
As for me, I used my ThinkPad as the server since I wasn't going to expose the whole thing to any network outside my house, so a local broadcast of the service was all I needed to do.
Here are the things that were done:
Next up:
Wait for it to start running, and then access the web version to set up the admin account.
This took two attempts. The first involved me writing my own script to download every photo on Google Photos using Playwright, which worked but was kind of time-consuming, and verifying that everything got downloaded was a lot of work. So, I would suggest you skip this and just use Google Takeout instead.
The problem with Google Takeout is that each photo's metadata, specifically the date and location, gets split out by Google Photos and hence needs to be re-added using an EXIF modifier. This makes migration to other apps a be a little more time consuming, but Immich has a supporting CLI tool called immich-go that allows you to use the same API key model of Immich to upload Takeout zips directly to the server while fixing the images as they come through. This makes the migration super easy for users to do. You might need to keep the laptop active while this is going on.
Steps
$ immich-go upload from-google-photos --server=http://your-ip:2283 --api-key=your-api-key /path/to/your/takeout-*.zip
This was easier since all you need to do is set up the Immich app on your mobile
device, connect it to the LAN IP of the server (in my case, the ThinkPad), and
select the folders you wish to back up and click on Start Backup. You can turn
on auto backup and background backup jobs in the settings as well.
You might want to change iCloud Photos settings on your device to Download and Keep Originals to ensure the high-quality images are uploaded to your Immich server.
In case you don't have a phone with iCloud Photos and want to do it from your MacBook, you can modify the same preference from the Photos app preferences and then select all images and export them to a folder on your laptop. Then you can use the immich-go CLI mentioned in the Google Photos section to upload the photos to the Immich server.
The iCloud cleanup is pretty easy. You keep the originals and then turn off iCloud Photos for your device, which will delete all the photos from your iCloud account. In my case, I wanted to reduce the used storage for iCloud but not completely delete everything, so I just got rid of all the photos older than one year. For Google Photos, however, I deleted everything, so now my mail started syncing properly again, and I have enough space for new immediate backups if I need them.
iCloud makes sure to keep the images in shared albums in check but if you use a lot of shared albums then just make sure you delete images carefully or use filters on macOS to only delete images that are not in any album.