immich VS yunohost

Have you tried using the Files app for image/file transfers? You can add Samba (and other) shares in there by tapping the '...' in the upper-right corner, hitting 'Connect to Server', then inputting your local server's address and connecting. I use this not just for photos, but for transferring various files and docs to/from my phone/home server.

You mentioned not wanting to mass-select 2000+ photos. If the photos you're uploading fall within a certain date range, you can open the Photos app, search for the date range of photos you want to upload (e.g. "April 20 2024 to today", or "sept 21 2018 to mar 2020"). It'll return photos taken in that date range, where you can tap 'See All', then 'Select' > 'Select All' at the top of the screen. Then you can hit the 'Share' dialogue and upload to your server through Files without having to scroll and select tons of individual pics. Keep in mind that you can't use a '-' in place of the word 'to' when specifying a date range for some reason.

If your images are family memories, you might be interested in Immich[1] (if you're open to making changes to your photo storage setup). Stand up and configure the local server, install the smartphone app, enable automatic sync, and it'll automatically upload new photos from your phone when you open the Immich app. No need for you to manually keep track of your photo syncs. Built to be a local Google Photos replacement. Has features like shared albums, face recognition/person naming, smart search, etc. AI tasks, like everything else, are done entirely locally. It's a nice piece of software, and lots of people (including privacy advocate Louis Rossmann) vouch for it.

[1] https://immich.app/

https://immich.app/ has built in auto-detection and tagging.

I am surprised by the over-engineered comment. Object auto-detection is kind of an advanced feature and I would expect a lot of extra infra required for it. Immich hides it because they just publish docker containers for you but I imagine it would feel more complex if you were to look at the internals.

It really is hard to leave Gmail when all of your data has been conveniently stored therein. This is one of Google's retention strategies and it is indeed brilliant.

That said, there's a vast number of self-hosted alternatives like Stalwart Mail (email) [1], Immich (images) [2], NextCloud (Google Docs) [3], etc.

[1] https://stalwa.rt

[2] https://immich.app

[3] https://nextcloud.com/

Last year we added CLIP-based image search to https://immich.app/ and even though I have a pretty good understanding of how it works, it still blows my mind damn near every day. It's the closest thing to magic I've ever seen.

I’m a big fan of https://immich.app/ and I use it every day for thousands of assets

Pull that old laptop from the closet, the one with the broken screen and keyboard which made you so sad to put it to pasture since it did have plenty of memory and CPU to keep up. Install Debian on the thing followed by Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE) [1]. Since you have 16GB of RAM in that laptop (or 8 but 16 is nicer) you should be able to run a number of containers [2].

Here's an idea, more or less based on a number of servers I configured for friends and family, based on 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 hardware with 2/4TB USB SSD. Your laptop will offer better performance.

- Create 4 or 5 containers and name them 'auth', 'serve´, 'base', 'backup' and 'mail' (if you want to run your own mail that is, otherwise skip that one). Their functions are:

> auth runs LDAP, Kerberos (if you want that), a central letsencrypt instance which takes care of all your certificate needs and anything else related to authentication and authorisation

> base runs databases, that means Postgresql, Mysql/Mariadb, Redis, RabbitMQ and whatnot - all depending on what you need.

> serve runs services, that means nginx or another web server which is used as a reverse proxy for the other web-related things you want to run: 'cloud' services like Nextcloud with everything that comes with it (e.g. Collaboraoffice or Onlyoffice to replace whatever web-based office things you currently use), communications services like XMPP, application-specific proxies like Invidious/Nitter/Libreddit, media services like Peertube/Airsonic/Ampache, a Wiki like Bookstack, search services like SearxNG, etc. - the size of your server is the limit.

> backup runs Proxmox Backup Server and is used to backup everything to some external drive and to some outside repository.

> mail runs mail services, only if you want to run those. I always say 'do it' but many people have an irrational fear of running their own mail services. That fear is not grounded in truth, running mail is not hard and offers many advantages over hosted solutions.

While it is possible to separate all the mentioned services out into their own containers I think this adds needless complexity for little to no gain. Separating out database services makes sense since those can end up quite taxing and as such might well be moved to their own hardware in some (possibly not too distant) future. Separating out authentication services makes sense since that lowers the attack surface compared to running them together with externally available services. The same goes for mail services which is why I put those in their own container.

Once you've got this up and running you can create a few more containers to play around with. If you just want to try out services something like Yunohost [3] or Caprover [4] can come in handy but I do not see these as viable alternatives to installing and running services which you intend to keep around for a long time.

Of course you can do most of this on a VPS as well but I prefer to keep thing in-house - the fewer dependencies, the better.

[1] https://proxmox.com/en/

[2] containers perform better and take less memory than VMs but if VMs are your thing that is possible as well

[3] https://yunohost.org

[4] https://caprover.com/

Yunohost is one of those mature projects, that's fully open source.

YunoHost, although not Docker-based, is still nice and quite mature.

If you want something like that, then CasaOS is pretty great and i can recommend it, especially for a beginner. There is also Cosmos and Tipi. Yunuhost too but a bit different approach. Oh and Umbrel is a thing...

However you quickly reach the limits of what Umbrel can do, its very basic in its abilities. Of course it depends all on what you (or anyone else) wants to do with it. There is also CasaOS which is very similar to Umbrel but last i compared, Casa offered a bit more features like for example adding your own docker projects easily. There is also Tipi which i must admit i havent taken a closer look at yet. And there is Yunohost which i guess aims at a similar audience but achieves these things differently, still worth mentioning tho.

This looks exciting and definitely something to look out for as an option fkr self-hosting.

Similiar and a little bit more mature is also YunoHost, https://yunohost.org/, or for professional environments, UCS https://www.univention.com/.

I use https://yunohost.org on my Pi, mostly for monitoring other stuff but you can get Nextcloud running just fine with it!