Managing ernormous personal Photos/Videos and automating on PC/Android/NAS

You can try syncthing for one part of your requirement.

Install syncthing on mobiles and the backup server. Each phone has its own share for media and deletions on mobile are handled with one way sync and a custom versioning script copying deleted pics to another main media directory. This way even when a pic is deleted, there's still a copy on the server.

Consider these directories as live copies of mobile and do not modify them directly. Only work/organize the dedicated copies in the main media folder.

For shared documents create a common syncthing share and add it to all devices that need these files.

For backup to cloud you can use rclone.

Don't have any suggestions on how to organize though. For sharing the media locally you can use any of the local network file share like smb or nfs etc (better not to work on the originals but local copies).

You can give it a try and see if it fits your requirement(with some changes may be).

Don't have much inputs on automatic media organization.

It may not be exactly what you are looking for but you could host your own nextcloud on your unraid/nas/rpi. It comes with the mobile clients. And sort of works like google photos (but less sophisticated). Last time I tested it, it even had face recognition on the photos. It's a poor man's G-suite replacement.

Sorry this will probably be a word soup

Use unraid, SMB and any decent app that supports SMB. (FolderSync for syncing, FX file explorer, Solid explorer, built in SMB support in the File managers on android/ios/windows)

In your unraid server, create a container/vm to run the SMB server and mount your storage in this container.

Create a SMB user for each user that needs access to this machine

Create a shared folder that'll be accessible with rw permissions to every one

Create 1 folder for each user that only the user will have access to.

The downside of this is, People who have access to the server can see data for all users. I have not been able to find a reliable/standard way to do full e2e encrypted setup in this configuration.

I do not recommend apps that store data in their own format(like seafile) because if some thing breaks, you'll have a difficult time recovering data and you'll be dependent on their apps on all platforms.


What kind of backups are you looking for? Is this cold backups or will you be accessing it frequently?

There are services like wasabi that are cheaper than S3 that can be accessed frequently and there are services like AWS s3 glacier which charges you 1$/TB/mo for storage and 92$/TB for retrieval.


Use rclone for syncing files from your unraid container to the cloud service.

Use SMB on windows. You'll be able to use LR and most other apps with the SMB mount like any normal folder.

A small section from my SMB configuration
(fruit stuff is for improving compatibility on apple devices. you can skip that)
[global] workgroup = WORKGROUP server string = Samba Server %v netbios name = nas security = user map to guest = bad user server min protocol = SMB2_10 client max protocol = SMB3 client min protocol = SMB2_10 min protocol = SMB2 protocol = SMB3 encrypt passwords = true dns proxy = no ntlm auth = true log file = /var/log/samba/smb.log max log size = 10000 ea support = yes vfs objects = fruit streams_xattr fruit:metadata = stream fruit:model = MacSamba fruit:posix_rename = yes fruit:veto_appledouble = no fruit:nfs_aces = no fruit:wipe_intentionally_left_blank_rfork = yes fruit:delete_empty_adfiles = yes [ishan] path = /main/ishan valid users = ishan browsable = yes writable = yes guest ok = no read only = no hide unreadable = yes access based share enum = yes [user2] path = /main/user2 valid users = user2 browsable = yes writable = yes guest ok = no read only = no hide unreadable = yes access based share enum = yes [cameras] path = /mnt/cameras valid users = ishan user2 browsable = yes writable = no guest ok = no read only = yes hide unreadable = yes access based share enum = yes [user3] path = /main/user3 valid users = user3 browsable = yes writable = yes guest ok = no read only = no hide unreadable = yes access based share enum = yes

ishanjain28 said:

...FolderSync for syncing, ... Solid explorer, built in SMB support in the File managers on android/ios/windows

Click to expand...

I've been using this combo forever and can attest to their smooth and fast operation.

FolderSync will copy Pics + Videos to PC over WiFi (can be configure for mobile data as well) to a device specific folder (separate folder per device)
Then it will move RAW images which are a memory hog

lockhrt999 said:

It may not be exactly what you are looking for but you could host your own nextcloud on your unraid/nas/rpi. It comes with the mobile clients. And sort of works like google photos (but less sophisticated). Last time I tested it, it even had face recognition on the photos. It's a poor man's G-suite replacement.

Click to expand...

I'm in search for Google photos replacement for my family, my free google storage if over and don't want to pay for extra space. Nextcloud looks promising.
Does nextcloud work over internet with dynamic ip?
How fast is backup and retrieval?
I don't have a NAS yet, but looking to setup one for plex, private cloud, pi-hole etc.