zlacker

>>birdcu+(OP)
I never even used Google Photos (because, you know), so if somebody could explain more concretely: how do you use it? Is it actually a backup app (and if so, is it really much different from using a generic backup app or even just syncthing), or does it somehow magically allow you to keep the preview gallery and search on your device, while your actual 200 GB of photos are somewhere in the cloud and the local storage is basically just auto-managed cache, where everything you didn't access in the last 6 months gets deleted? Does it preserve all this additional data Android cameras add, like HDR, video fragments before photos, does it handle photospheres well, etc? I'm asking because I don't even fully understand how the camera app handles it itself, and if all the data is fully portable.

FWIW, I also don't use any fancy collection management and barely understand what all these Lightrooms and XMP files are for. Maybe I should, but up to this day photos for me are just a bunch of files in the folder, that I sometimes manually group into subfolders like 2025-09, mostly to make it easier on thumbnail-maker.

>>krick+yAj
You can back up to Immich using various methods, including dumb file copy into a dropbox folder. For a while, I was using PhotoSync that uploaded photos to my NAS with Immich using WebDAV.

Immich also has an app that can upload photos to your server automatically. You can store them there indefinitely. There are galleries, timelines, maps for geotagged photos, etc.

The app also allows you to browse your galleries from your phone, without downloading full-resolution pictures. It's wickedly fast, especially in your home network.

> Does it preserve all this additional data Android cameras add, like HDR, video fragments before photos, does it handle photospheres well, etc?

It preserves the information from sidecar files and the original RAW files. The RAW processing is a bit limited right now, and it doesn't support HDR properly. However, the information is not lost and once they polish the HDR support, you'll just need to regenerate the miniatures.