Yesterday I turned off iCloud Photo synching, and then I wiped my photos from iCloud Photos but before that I took several precautions.
Triple Backup to Apple Devices with Enough Storage The first precaution I took was to ensure that the Photos app on a mac was downloading all the original photos locally. While this task was taking place I also got an iPhone 8+ and an older iPad to backup my photos locally to their hard drives.
Many years ago, if I took photos with a nokia phone I had to sync them via a memory card. With the arrival of the Android Nexus on and the Apple iPhone our digital photography habits changed. With time we would leave our cameras at home, and carry our mobile phones, and photograph paries and hikes with these.
In the process we had two apps to backup. Google Photos and iPhoto.
I grew up in the eighties, and 90s, and so computing, open source software and the world wide web grew up with me. In that time we went from going to magazine shops to buy mags, and cd shops to buy CDs, and book shops to buy books. We also took photos on rolls of films and then took those rolls to La Combe or the Garden Centre to have the films processed, and then we put them in albums.
On the 17th of February I will stop using Google One Drive and I was looking at the smaller tiers. You have 15 gigabytes for free, 100, and 200 gigabyte options, and then 200 gigabytes. At the moment I have 200 GB on Google Drive for documents and three hundred GB for photos. All of those photos are now backed up with Immich, PhotoPrism, and possibly one or two other storage solutions.
While playing with Nextcloud I found a serious flaw. If you add images via the command line from one directory to another, and then delete them, then their ghosts remain in the timeline. By ghosts I mean references to these files in the CMS and there is no quick way of removing them. You need to remove them individually and that’s time consuming. That’s why, when I was trying to find a solution I came across Photoprism.
A few years ago I bought a 256 gigabyte iphone because I wanted more space and for a long time it was great because it meant that I had plenty of room to grow into. The issue comes when you get to over 200 gigabytes of data stored in iCloud because you go from 3 CHF per month to 10 CHF per month. You go from 36 CHF per year to 120 CHF per year.