I’m kind of surprised I’ve struggled with this so long. Right now I’ve been using nextcloud camera upload, and mostly it works ok but shits the bed once in a while without me noticing and I need to spend time fixing it and it’s never as simple as turning it off and on again.
I recently tried syncthing, and while it works, it frequently crashed and got stuck in a state where it says it’s on and working by my destination folder is shown as disconnected, and the options to restart syncthing from the side menu are greyed out and the only way to make it work again is by force closing it and reopening it.
I’m running vanilla stock Google Android and truenas, does anyone have a better solution?
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I use Syncthing to sync DCIM and Pictures folders from Android to my computer. Every six month or so, I move pictures from these folder to the folder for this years pictures: home/pictures/2025. So they disappear from my phone as well, which is great to free up space. This works great for me.
I played more and got it working a bit better. Where it becomes a management nightmare is how it’s designed. Too much of a hassle to sync between a server and DHCP clients over different vlans.
After managing pictures from my phones and DSLR I finally took the time to set up immich.
And it was definitely worth it.- USB cable from iPhone to PC.
- Sort by date in filemanager.
- Copy all images since last date backed up to my PC.
- Review and delete crappy images.
- Move to my NAS via filemanager.
- Create a textfile called t.ex. 07juli (so that next time I know to copy files after this date, since I like to keep most pics on my phone).
Do this once or twice a month :)
This works well, but not when you have 13k/150GB of photos lol
I do this too, but I automate renaming with exiftool and synchronizing with rsync.
Immich
Immich supports image uploads from a phone?
Yes.
It can also sync across the internet if you have it set up appropriately.Very neat and they have recently implemented (chrome) casting capability into the app.
This is cool, unfortunately for me I’m too lazy to set up like 5 dockers for immich right now lol.
Yes
This is the way
How can I sync all my photos locally to a new phone / device? Last I tried it, I had to sync one picture at a time
I wouldnt use immich like that.
You backup your images to immich.
Once there, you keep them there primarily and stream what you need (redownloading like it works on Google photos doesnt work like that as it stores the pictures in it’s own folder).
At least that’s how I use it.Hm ok. I prefer to have a complete set of pictures on the phone in case the server goes to shit, as a third backup
I think I will stick to syncthing
In theory you can do that.
It just doesnt redownload to (usually) DCIM.
But say you upload your DCIM folder to immich, they are both on-device and on your server.
Until you delete them on the phone.In my case, I got a new phone and expected I could use Immich to reupload all the images to the new phone. But that didn’t seem the case. With syncthing, it was easy.
But you lose the other benefits of immich when using syncthing, like sharing. the gallery app on my phone does a lot of the other things like faces, map …
Yeah in that use case syncthing fits more than immich.
In theory you probably could use immich.
During a phone replacement you pause immich sync, use syncthing to transfer the pictures and then enable immich sync again.I believe immich should be able to detect those “new” pictures as duplicates and not upload it again.
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I plan to use immich just what’s the difference between latest and next on their site? Is next the like beta testing?
rclone is pretty reliable. That’s how I back up my nextcloud to two different object storage sites. I have Nextcloud dockerized on a VPS in the cloud (among other dockerized services for selfhosting). Been syncing nonstop for 3 years now. I also used rclone to sync all my files from OneDrive directly to my VPS block storage. Rclone is a very underrated utility.
When SyncThing is correctly configured (battery optimizations , etc.), you won’t have any issues. (I’ve been using SyncThing for many many years now.)
Any suggestions on how to optimize it? :)
Using it on my steamdeck and on-demand on my phone.Set up a “global” ignore file that gets synced between devices. Call it
.stignoreglobalfor example and and change the.stignorefile (which doesnt get synced) on every device to only include. Now your ignore state gets synced between devices and you can make changes from anywhere.Mine looks like this:
// Incomplete Downloads *.part *.crdownload // OS-generated files desktop.ini Thumbs.db // Cache cache spotifycache // Unity analytics Unity // LineageOS updater org.lineageos.updater // No read access :( /Android/{data,obb}You can learn how to write one yourself here: https://docs.syncthing.net/users/ignoring.html
Other stuff:
- On Android I use this: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.github.catfriend1.syncthingandroid/
- Some Info on how you can reduce battery usage: https://github.com/Catfriend1/syncthing-android/blob/main/wiki/Info-on-battery-optimization-and-settings-affecting-battery-usage.md
- Make sure SyncThing is excluded from your phone’s battery optimizations (varies by vendor).
- To save on mobile bandwidth I have it set up to only sync on WiFi.
- You can set up a symmetric key (basically a password) and sync your stuff to a friends instance. Your friend will not be able to read the data without the key (make sure it’s a long random string). This also helps if you’re running a SyncThing instance on a VPS for example.
Neat!
I am already using a selective sync for my emulator save data between my NAS, PC and steamdeck in a triangle sync and on top another sync for the data I generate on my phone.
I might wipe data from syncthing and try again, I think I accidentally screwed up one of those settings and was never prompted again thereafter.
Check your Syncthing settings. It’s a very reliable piece of software. Other than that Immich, but that’s a slightly different use case.
As others has posted. Immich or photoprism. But, i’d check your settings, nextcloud instant upload and syncthing work wonders for me.
I wasn’t aware that either of these had a syncing feature. How well does immich work? I’ve been looking to switch to it from phptoprism for a while
I’m getting my first server up and running and always considered getting immich. But lately I’m leaning towards photoprism because of updates breaking immich sometimes apparently and photoprism being more mature(?).
Why do you want to switch?Didnt have any issue so far with immich.
A case of not reading the release notes? (no offense just asking)
And tbf, they say they arent fully done for now. Essentially a very public beta.Good to know, thank you!
It wasn’t very clear, but that was based on other people’s comments; I haven’t gotten to installing either of them. (I need to get on it lol). But that makes sense. I saw people say just don’t auto update, because it is early days like you said.They explicitly mention in the deployment steps to pin the release number.
After that it’s just a case of reading the patch notes and looking out for breaking changes.And obviously keeping backups :)
Sorry. Couldnt help you with that. I use nextcloud and syncthing myself.
Havent try immich but i heard immich was the next best thing, be aware though, last i heard even the dev said the app was in active development so things might break.
I think it’s because I have 150GB of photos on 2 different phones and don’t clean them out often.
Photoprism recommends you download a $5 app. It works ok enough, but they are clearly trying to monetize.
I’ve had pretty good experience with Nextcloud’s instant upload. The only time I’ve had it shit the bed was ages ago when it would occasionally get stuck on a conflict, but that hasn’t happened in a long time. Pretty much all of my image folders (camera/DCIM, Screenshots, Downloads) get synced. The only annoying thing was when apps would suddenly change where they download to and I’d have to reconfigure yet another sync folder, but I can’t really fault NC for that.
Mine is set to upload and keep a local copy and only do a one way sync (phone to NC). Not sure if that causes less issues than a 2 way sync or deleting the local copy after upload?
I like it as well, but it has a tendency to just stop working every few months for some reason. Everything appears to be in order, the folder sync is active, but it just doesn’t automatically upload anymore. It only starts working if I tell it to sync to a different folder instead. It is good otherwise though.
Weird. Other than how it used to choke when there were conflicts (and all uploads stopped until that was fixed) I haven’t had any issues like that. Guess I’m just lucky.
I’ve had nothing but issues with NC instant upload, and stopped using it. It’s error prone and needs constant hand holding for no good reason. It didn’t handle taking a picture and then deleting it instantly very well (and will throw your notifications at you for this, often more than 1). When you have limited connectivity it will utterly confuse itself and ask you to resolve conflicts for 100 files for no reason, when it could just checksum server and client files and notice they are all the exact same. Also when set to only upload on WiFi, and not being connected to WiFi it often still spams notifications that the “upload failed”, despite not being supposed to upload anything. And btw. it could upload files just fine, they failed only because upload on mobile is disabled!
It’s a nightmare. Commonly also referred to as a cluster fuck.
I’ve been using FolderSync. It let’s you sync to/from a remote server through a bunch of different protocols like SMB, SFTP, and WebDAV. You can schedule it to run automatically.
I haven’t tried it myself, but I think there is a way you can get Tasker to run scripts in Termux. You could set up your own rsync scripts that way.
I can’t remember a time where I didn’t have issues with syncing apps. They always just seem to stop working and it’s always frustrated me. It feels like to me there’s too much complexity under the hood and it exhausts me when something goes wrong.
As a result I’ve been using
rsynccommands as a way to sync files and folders. After the initial setup, I haven’t experienced any issues and it’s been consistent and reliable. I even created my own tool which simplifies eachrsynccommand into a file for easier syncing/restoring of my data. I use it to sync between my laptop, android phone using Termux terminal and my two Raspberry Pi’s.Rsync does have limitations like not being able to do two-way syncing but for my usage I am okay with that. I’m generally backing up data in most cases. Rsync does offer more flexibility since it’s a command line tool so I’m able to create backups of my entire system or sync specific files and folders. I can also set up cron jobs to have syncs performed periodically but I mainly do all my syncing manually because I like to see where all my data is moving.
As long as all my devices have static IP addresses within the network and I don’t mess around with any directory names/locations, everything just works and I’ve had a lot less headaches managing my data and backups. I also have a lot more confidence in my backup/restore process when compared to when I used other syncing programs/apps in the past.
