Physical Photo Storage for photos from IOS

[Volvolover]

Hi

I want to back up/sync my photos from iOS devices to a physical drive. I have nothing in terms of hardware at present , what are my options/what are others using?

[Northernboy]

Volvolover said:

Hi

I want to back up/sync my photos from iOS devices to a physical drive. I have nothing in terms of hardware at present , what are my options/what are others using?

An iMac.

[Volvolover]

Northernboy said:

Volvolover said:

Hi

I want to back up/sync my photos from iOS devices to a physical drive. I have nothing in terms of hardware at present , what are my options/what are others using?

An iMac.

Probably a bit OTT to buy a Mac purely to store photos on? Was thinking more of a NAS type thing?

[cobra kid]

Volvolover said:

Probably a bit OTT to buy a Mac purely to store photos on? Was thinking more of a NAS type thing?

Perhaps a NAS drive then?

[gangzoom]

Volvolover said:

Probably a bit OTT to buy a Mac purely to store photos on? Was thinking more of a NAS type thing?

Even with a NAS drive I persume you want to delete old photos on the phone to make space?

You need a photo library that you can manage and assign NAS storage location, as far as I know there is no iOs or Android app that can do that. Even Lightroom mobile cannot do it.

One of the few things my laptop can do which my phone cannot is photo archiving/back up to NAS - I use Lightroom room.

Work flow is:

Back up phone (Android) to Mac OS and than delete from phone -> Import photos to Lightroom with storage on hard drive -> Time machine back up of hard drive weekly -> 6 monthly/annually move photos on the hard drive to NAS.

So hardware terms, laptop and NAS, than decent software Lightroom or similar.

However as now 99.99% of photos I take is only on the phone I am tempted to forget any kind of NAS storage and just do this:

Take photo on phone-> Autoback to Flickr/Google or what ever cloud storage.

Verus local storage no need for hardware or software but cloud storage will cost £50/year for 1TB or there abouts.

Ofcourse there is always the worry of 'what if the Internet dies' with cloud based store but if the Internet dies there are probably more things to worry about than photo back up........Half term without access to iPlayer/Netflix/Youtube, that is the stuff of real nightmares .

Edited by gangzoom on Thursday 18th February 06:21

[mmm-five]

If you want a physical backup, then surely you're going to have to print them all out and stick them in an album

[essayer]

PhotoSync

It’s an app running on your iPhone which syncs photos/videos to somewhere; could be a Windows PC over usb/Wi-Fi, or cloud storage if you have a suitable place. It does HEVC conversion too if needed.



You can just copy the files off on a Windows PC + lightning cable but the directory structure on the phone is a bit obscure

[Northernboy]

Volvolover said:

Probably a bit OTT to buy a Mac purely to store photos on? Was thinking more of a NAS type thing?

I thought that, but never managed to get it to work.
You can buy an adaptor to plug an SD card into the phone, have you looked into whether that’s an option?

[Brainpox]

Technically iCloud stores them on a physical drive

[Northernboy]

Brainpox said:

Technically iCloud stores them on a physical drive

Yes, “the cloud” just means somebody else’s computer.

OP, be careful how you keep your libraries synchroniséd. I’ve nie got five different versions each with around 30,000 pictures, and don’t know if any of them has the complete set.

[BigTZ4M]

essayer said:

PhotoSync

Another vote for this from me. You can use any NAS that can present an SMB share on your network (pretty much all of them) - heck even a windows PC with a share on it if you want. I have a share on my NAS (on 24x7) and then use Photsync's auto backup feature. Every time I return to the house and reconnect to my WiFi it transfers a copy of my my photos that are new since the last time it synced automatically.

It's just a pain the first time you set it up because it's quite likely most of your photos are not on your phone but on iCloud so it has to download them all before uploading to your NAS and takes a good while but that's only the first time you run it.

[AJB88]

I'd use Apple Cloud or Google Photos (I use Google).

[Volvolover]

BigTZ4M said:

essayer said:

PhotoSync

Another vote for this from me. You can use any NAS that can present an SMB share on your network (pretty much all of them) - heck even a windows PC with a share on it if you want. I have a share on my NAS (on 24x7) and then use Photsync's auto backup feature. Every time I return to the house and reconnect to my WiFi it transfers a copy of my my photos that are new since the last time it synced automatically.

It's just a pain the first time you set it up because it's quite likely most of your photos are not on your phone but on iCloud so it has to download them all before uploading to your NAS and takes a good while but that's only the first time you run it.

Can you recommend a NAS? I'm really not up on home hardware at all

[theaxe]

I use Google Photos and then each month I download a ZIP of the last month's photos and drop them into AWS S3 Glacier. That way I get the features of Google but also a second copy in case something goes wrong.

[Volvolover]

A bit of a steer from a mate in IT has pointed me at this https://www.broadbandbuyer.com/products/26671-qnap...

[mattley]

Volvolover said:

I want to back up/sync my photos from iOS devices to a physical drive.

First question, Why?

iCloud is £6.99 ppm for 2TB how can buying a NAS configuring it, backing it up etc be in any way better than a couple of clicks.

[mojitomax]

The cheapest way if you already own a Mac or pc is to turn on photo stream.

It will stream the last 30days of your photos to your Mac or pc and they will be permanently saved on the Mac or pc.

Then back that up as normal.

Alternatively pay for the Apple cloud photos storage which will save to the cloud and also to a Mac. Not sure if it works on pc

[BigTZ4M]

Volvolover said:

Can you recommend a NAS? I'm really not up on home hardware at all

Anything that suits you by Synology or QNap. I think the Synology actually comes with software to do what you want out of the box. I’d avoid the single disk solutions from the hard drive manufacturers like WD My Cloud thingys. Too cramped, loud, drives over heat and I’ve personally found them troublesome.

I make my own (it’s basically just building a PC but with a NAS operating system) but that’s not for everyone.

[gangzoom]

essayer said:

PhotoSync

It’s an app running on your iPhone which syncs photos/videos to somewhere; could be a Windows PC over usb/Wi-Fi, or cloud storage if you have a suitable place. It does HEVC conversion too if needed.



You can just copy the files off on a Windows PC + lightning cable but the directory structure on the phone is a bit obscure

How do you manage a photo library with that on a phone? Does it work with Lightroom App?

I've got about 340 gigs of photos on the NAS drive, but cannot find a way to view/sort/manage them without using Lightroom or similar on a desktop.

My phone currently only has about 3 gigs of photos, and I tend to move photos off the phone every few months. So its not really syncing but archiving.

Flickr/Google though is much easier to access than the NAS drive + laptop.

[AJB88]

theaxe said:

I use Google Photos and then each month I download a ZIP of the last month's photos and drop them into AWS S3 Glacier. That way I get the features of Google but also a second copy in case something goes wrong.

Good way of doing it that in my opinion.