Question Where do you store your home videos and photos online?

[davidortenn79]

Ok, I'm beyond frustrated trying to find a decent online photo album. I feel like I have some pretty basic requirements, but the only solution is google photos... no other one matches the bill.

I'm not a photographer. I'm just a paraniod dad that never wants to loose or home videos or photos. I have 20+ years of them. They're digital so they can be gone in an instant.

Requirements

I have to pay for the storage. So, if I pay for 2 TB of storage, I should be able to upload as many full quality photos and as large and high quality of videos as I want as long as I don't go over the paid storage amount.

I need to be able to update the date and time of the photos and videos on the website so the timeline is in the correct order.

I need to have direct file access to the files so I can access the photos and videos using windows explorer, command prompt, scripts, etc. (Dropbox, Onedrive, etc... fit this bill.)

That's basically it. I can't find anything other than google photos. Flickr and other photo album services will limit how long or how high of quality of a video you can upload, so rules those out.

I've been trying to use exif editors on my old scanned photos and uploading them to Dropbox and Onedrive. I have photos from 1910. Dropbox seems to change them all to 1970. Onedrive doesn't notice the change at all and lists them as 2024. I used chatgpt to write a script and the chatbot said it updated every field that it can to update the date, yet onedrive still recognizes it as a 2024 photo.

But, either way, it's super annoying to have to use a script to modify the exif data for each photo.... seems like the website should be able to do that... like google photos.

I have all of my stuff in google photos, but I want two sets of my stuff. One, it helps me a lot to put two photo albums next to eachother to look for anomolies to find missing stuff or things out of place. google doesn't allow for command line access (at least easily other than api access and they have strct limits on that.) I wrote scripts that help me find duplicates and find problelms, but I need command line access for that stuff to work. I have a nas, but the nas is so slow. Cloud storage is so much faster.

 

[USAFRet]

Backups.

The basic concept is 3-2-1.
3 copies, on at least 2 different devices, at least 1 of which is offline or otherwise inaccessible.

One of the problems with your only backup in 'the cloud', is that the cloud provider can change their policies at any time. Possibly rendering your data inaccessible.

Another problem is maybe time. If one of your in house drives were to die right now....how long will it take to recover all of it from 'the cloud'?

My stuff is:
In the PC
Second copy in the house NAS
Third copy in another volume in the NAS
Fourth and disaster level copy in a couple of drives in a desk drawer at work.


What NAS do you have, and in what way is it "slow"?

 

[davidortenn79]

I have a synology ds923+ with three seagate 12 TB drives in a RAID 5 configuration. But, I have the NAS doing quite a bit of stuff. One, its our Plex server for the house. i have a network tv tuner hooked to our tv antenna on the house. the synology nas is the DVR, so that's constantly running on it. I have a few docker containers hosting some one off websites on it I use, but they're pretty low utilization... But, sometimes if I'm doing something too intensive on the NAS and we're watching TV, it will cause the TV to start freezing. But, usually the part that annoys me is just working in synology photos. Moving photos or videos sometimes takes forever. I was deleting empty folders yesterday. I started timing it. Slightly over 2 minutes from the time I clicked on delete until the empty folder was deleted and I could actually do something on the gui. The NAS is just so slow. It seems to work well as a home DVR and media server when that's about all it's doing.

 

[davidortenn79]

I do have two spare 12 TB drives lying around the house so, if one of the 3 RAID 5 drives died, I can replace them before the RAID fails. But, the NAS backs up to a 12 TB local USB drive as well as synology C2. (I bought a ton of those 12 TB drives...) I do have all of my important photos and videos also backed up to BD-R that is the M discs that supposedly last like 10,000 years or whatever... in my closet. House burns down, they're gone. I work from home. I used to have an office where I'd hide some backups there. But that's what the C2 is... offsite backups. I also have google drives and one drive.

 

[davidortenn79]

What I just started doing a few days ago, is I setup Google Photos every 2 months to do a takeout to my dropbox account. So, theoretically I'm backing up from cloud to cloud. So, I'm not worried about loosing it. But, the thing about home videos and photos I've been trying to figure out how do I know if something is msising? We have so much. It all becomes noise after a while. If something does come up missing, which I have found things missing in places where I thought it was OK, how would I know? Every week, month, year, it's growing. So, that's one of my docker containers, what it does. I have one docker container that's running dupeguru that scans my synology nas for dupes. That docker image then generates a CSV file that I feed into a docker image that I setup to parse the CSV file. That docker page then gives me copy names of filenames. But, quite often they're names that are pretty generic. like DSC1023.JPG. That name is generic that I might have 4 or 5 different timeframes my phone or camera game me that filename. So, if I search DSC1023 in both google photos and also synology photos, I compare them side by side. I might notice that google photos has photos that my synology photos does have. I've found that taking off the extesion and searching DSC1023 in synology and then, for whatever reason, if I add double quotes and search google for "DSC1023", it searches very similar. Without the quotes in google, it searches broad. So, I setup the docker page to give me two copy buttons, one without quotes and one with quotes.

I'll admit, I've been designing a lot of my own stuff lately. Apps that are unique only to my setup. I'm not that much of a genius. I've been messing a lot with chatgpt lately. It has done some pretty cool stuff for me. It's restored a lot of my home videos to original quality. Some of my home videos were a little messed up in their mp4 format. but I was able to restore the original .mod files, which synology can't play those, and chatgpt created for me a tool that it stated had minimal loss of quality with a balance of size and created me mp4 files. they look perfect... at least as good as the oirignals and work on my synology.

 

[USAFRet]

But, usually the part that annoys me is just working in synology photos. Moving photos or videos sometimes takes forever. I was deleting empty folders yesterday. I started timing it. Slightly over 2 minutes from the time I clicked on delete until the empty folder was deleted and I could actually do something on the gui. The NAS is just so slow. It seems to work well as a home DVR and media server when that's about all it's doing.

Your system seems to have issues.

My near 8 year old QNAP does not exhibit that, at all.
Delete a folder, seconds.

"Slightly over 2 minutes" is unreasonable.

 

[davidortenn79]

When i was at my parents last christmas, they had a basement cupboards full of home photos that had sat there for 30+ years no one looked at them. So, when I was there, I took them all. Emptied my parents out. Brought them back to my house. Bought this $700 Epson photo scanner and scanned them all in. Now I have photos back to the early 1910s of my family all in google photos and synology photos. It's just so much to keep up with.

Oh yeah, I also setup a mariadb server on my synology nas that has a table with all of the data from all of my pictures so, I can also run sql queries on that for stuff that is there. I've gone a little crazy.

 

[davidortenn79]

Your system seems to have issues.

My near 8 year old QNAP does not exhibit that, at all.
Delete a folder, seconds.

"Slightly over 2 minutes" is unreasonable.

That's my problem. I don't know why. Usually it's quick. But, sometimes it hangs. I'm not sure why. But that's where I'm like just a second copy in a cloud somewhere. Probably no matter how good I think my nas is, probably a cloud photo album service is better. It's faster using hardware I can't afford. The NAS I have now is just a cheap $1,000 NAS or whatever I spent on it. Probably all said and done, $1,500 with all of the drives.

 

[davidortenn79]

That's my problem. I don't know why. Usually it's quick. But, sometimes it hangs. I'm not sure why. But that's where I'm like just a second copy in a cloud somewhere. Probably no matter how good I think my nas is, probably a cloud photo album service is better. It's faster using hardware I can't afford. The NAS I have now is just a cheap $1,000 NAS or whatever I spent on it. Probably all said and done, $1,500 with all of the drives.

But, when you look at the resources on it, they're usually pretty low. Nothing looks like it's maxing out.

 

[USAFRet]

That's my problem. I don't know why. Usually it's quick. But, sometimes it hangs. I'm not sure why. But that's where I'm like just a second copy in a cloud somewhere. Probably no matter how good I think my nas is, probably a cloud photo album service is better. It's faster using hardware I can't afford. The NAS I have now is just a cheap $1,000 NAS or whatever I spent on it. Probably all said and done, $1,500 with all of the drives.

Some offsite 3rd/4th copy is the typical thing to do.

The apparent slowness of your current NAS is a whole other issue.

 

[davidortenn79]

Photos it can't just be an offsite though. It needs to be somewhere easily accessible because I'm constantly adding to it. It's not like I've made my photos and videos and now I'm just backing them up. I'm constantly adding to them. we're constantly recording and snapping pics. I've noticed our photos and pictures started growing exponentially around 2017ish.

 

[davidortenn79]

I'll admit though, I have been medically diagnosed with OCD and anxiety. Working in IT and just stressing with loosing data... it's my profession. If I loose my data, that's sad. So, I am way over OCD about it. But, my OCD leads to me making it probaby way more complicated than it needs to be. I said to someone at work... I work from home. But we were sent home end of 2019. One every year or two, I go into the office. One of these years, we'll show up. You all will have your corvettes and I'll drive up in my rusty 2013 silverado and I'll be like where did you get that money? They'll be like, we saved all the money and bought this instead of planning for the disaster of google going out of business and spending a ton on backing up something that would never happen.