Storage Solutions NAS/Cloud photo web server

G

guptaji

Adept
Hey everyone,
I am looking for a solution to share and store all my photos and videos online on the cloud via a NAS server in my home. I feel subscription services like icloud and google storage and expensive and are on a subscription basis - so i am locked in for life. most other free services compress quality and I do not want that.
Now I have WD Mycloud 2TB cloud drive at home but accessing photos organised via people, location, album etc. is not an option and it is impossible to sort photos and videos in it. is there a software solution which can detect and organise my photos basis location/faces etc (like a photos app or icloud or google photos would) piggybacked on a NAS drive which I can drive at home?
would love to hear some thoughts as I am tired of stocking up my phone with photos which i do not where to transfer!
Please help!!
 
Good Question. I am also looking for such solution. One thing that bummed me was what would you do if the MyCloud disk failed? The idea of having it in cloud is not to only for accessing via the web but also it removes the botheration of having to worry about disk failures.

One of the cheapest (and probably the best and reliable) way is to get a MS Office 365 subscription. For around Rs 800 / year on shared subscription plan you get 1 TB of cloud storage for free. Then use one of the softwares that can connect to onedirve. There are many paid apps on Android platform so you can view your photos and videos from cloud on big screen. I have not yet explored these softwares fully but there should be some software that can do google photos like facial recognition and tagging.
 
Hey man. Thanks for the quick response.
The Ms office sub is a great idea. Do let me know if you find a good app that can allow easy Organization and seamless access across multiple devices - like I should be able to let my parents and cousins be able access the photos easily as well.
Also, what do you think about a solution like this? Should help mitigate disk failure risk too:
www.extremetech.com

How to Create Your Own Private Photo Sharing Cloud - ExtremeTech

If you want to be able to get at your photos from anywhere, and share them with others, without the cost or potential privacy issues of keeping them in a public cloud, here are some ways to DIY your own private photo sharing cloud.
www.extremetech.com www.extremetech.com
 
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guys, bumping this up for visibility.
thanks
Post automatically merged:

Ideally, I'm loking for a solution such as this:
getmonument.com

FAQ

How does Monument devices differ from cloud services (Dropbox / Google Photos / iCloud etc.)? When using cloud services, you get locked into a single company, almost impossible to move to another when you want. With your Monument devices, you own and have full control of your content. It’s your...
getmonument.com getmonument.com
 
Last edited:
guptaji said:
guys, bumping this up for visibility.
thanks
Post automatically merged:

Ideally, I'm loking for a solution such as this:
getmonument.com

FAQ

How does Monument devices differ from cloud services (Dropbox / Google Photos / iCloud etc.)? When using cloud services, you get locked into a single company, almost impossible to move to another when you want. With your Monument devices, you own and have full control of your content. It’s your...
getmonument.com getmonument.com
Click to expand...

Hi were you able to find a solution? I am in a similar situation as yours and very confused. thanks.
 
You are better off just paying for google one for the 100GB version. It brings a lot more value than anything that you can host yourself because of features like automatic face tagging and searching photos by objects or place. Photos sync from phone also works great (on android at least). I have set it to also backup the whatsapp media folder so I backup all photos.

I had decided to host things myself and it was a lot of fun setting it all up but it just didn't work well reliably. I then just decided to pay google.
If anyone is still interested I can give more details on my self-hosting experience.
 
mayank_asthana said:
You are better off just paying for google one for the 100GB version. It brings a lot more value than anything that you can host yourself because of features like automatic face tagging and searching photos by objects or place. Photos sync from phone also works great (on android at least). I have set it to also backup the whatsapp media folder so I backup all photos.

I had decided to host things myself and it was a lot of fun setting it all up but it just didn't work well reliably. I then just decided to pay google.
If anyone is still interested I can give more details on my self-hosting experience.
Click to expand...
Please do make a post. Would love to read that.
 
mayank_asthana said:
You are better off just paying for google one for the 100GB version. It brings a lot more value than anything that you can host yourself because of features like automatic face tagging and searching photos by objects or place. Photos sync from phone also works great (on android at least). I have set it to also backup the whatsapp media folder so I backup all photos.

I had decided to host things myself and it was a lot of fun setting it all up but it just didn't work well reliably. I then just decided to pay google.
If anyone is still interested I can give more details on my self-hosting experience.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the input. Yes please , would love to hear more about your self hosting experience.
 
My post is missing for some reason, posting again:

Synology NAS is a better solution, initial setup cost might be little higher but its one time cost.



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NAS unit : 17k
4tb HDD 2 Nos : 20k
UPS : 10k

Total cost of basic but decent NAS solution is : 47k, you can do better with different ways of procuring these products. But it will be the best solution.

Synology Moments app supports all kinds of things, I meant the more general things, like face tagging, places, things and organizing photos. No need to upload your photos to other sites for sharing, you share photos from your NAS itself. Moments app is available for all platforms, syncing is seamless from my phone, one I reach home & phone connects to wifi, all latest photos are synced to NAS. This is small part of use of this NAS, it is has many more features & use cases, I am not going discuss those here.

Note about UPS: UPS link shared above, supports Synology NAS & auto shutdown when the input power is not available. There might other UPS which support Synology but I am not aware of any others so I chose this specific model.
 
blackscorpio said:
Synology Moments app supports all kinds of things, I meant the more general things, like face tagging, places, things and organizing photos. No need to upload your photos to other sites for sharing, you share photos from your NAS itself. Moments app is available for all platforms, syncing is seamless from my phone, one I reach home & phone connects to wifi, all latest photos are synced to NAS. This is small part of use of this NAS, it is has many more features & use cases, I am not going discuss those here.
Click to expand...

Thanks Synology seems like the best choice at present, recommended by a few others as well. Will explore it more, just one quick question - Does it supports multiple users with their own separate space in the NAS?
 
I had built a home server with basic consumer hardware i5-8400 cpu, 56GB RAM, 120GB adata green SSD and lots of hard drives (4TB * 2, 10TB * 2, 6TB*1) in 2018.
Running ubuntu 18.04 server and lots of services in docker. I also got a static ip along with bsnl fibernet, so I had setup a domain to point to it.
The hard drives (4TB + 10TB)*2 running zfs in striped mirror configuration. And the 6TB hard disk for cctv recording.

For backing up photos and vidoes I had setup syncthing on all my family's phones. And owncloud webinterface to upload and view photos and videos.
Setting all this up was a lot of fun and a lot of learning. But making it run reliably was no fun at all. The syncthing app refused to run in the background on my phones even after fiddling with all battery saving features on the phones. The owncloud interface couldn't handle so many photos and it (or some other app) generated so many tiny thumbnail files everywhere. From over the internet, viewing photos/videos was quite fast, but uploading anything was damn slow, enough to be impractical. Also, since I had the web interface allowed to be connected from the internet, I used to see so many login attempts from bots, so I was also scared from being hacked.

Also, my home server used to randomly shutdown at night. I suspected the PSU was not powerful enough to power all the hard drives together so changed the PSU to an expensive one costing around 10k INR. That didn't fix the problem. Then I suspected that voltage fluctuations were causing it to go down. So I added a cheap UPS. I already had the server connected to a sinewave inverter to handle power cuts. That didn't fix it either. I then recognized the pattern that every time the AC was turned on at night, it caused the server to crash. So the problem was a voltage sag that happened when the AC compressor turned on. I then had to buy an expensive online double conversion UPS that costed me 16k INR and that finally fixed the issue.

Overall, it is a lot of fun and the homeserver is also useful, but maintenance is an ongoing challenge and I tend not to think about how much it ended up costing me. So, I don't recommend it to someone just looking to store photos and videos.
NAS devices are way too expensive for what they do.
 
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