re: the apple walled garden and paying monthly BS
there has been progress! previously i struggled to climb back into the apple garden after leaving for about 5 minutes. I started to use Immich for photo managing and general organizing, and am not going back. However the iOS app is laggy, and every photo is streamed to the device when you start to view it. So no internet connection, no photos. You can manually select photos to save on device in the immich app but i aint doing that for 15000+ photos. anyways...
I found this app PhotoSync. Basically it lets you transfer photos to and from the iOS camera roll, seamlessly. No loss of metadata, no forcefully changing the date and time to NOW. It just works.
I setup a simple SMB drive on my main desktop and logged in via the app. It will autotransfer any new photos to the SMB every night when the phone is plugged in (or a specific album or a range of dates or whatever I want). I also setup the SMB to work via Tailscale for when im not on my home wifi. That SMB folder is then periodically scanned by immich and included in the 'master' photo library for curating and archiving for long term.
I can now use the native iOS photo app, with all the backups handled automatically by a simple copy-paste to a drive managed by immich on my desktop. From there the photos are backed up again to another drive once per day, and that drive is mirrored in raid 1 with another.
The autotransfer is part of the paid version but there is a lifetime single fee for 25$. They also support pretty much every kind of cloud transfer. Well worth the money.
To recover all my photos onto my phone for local viewing I did a one time transfer from the SMB to the phone. Took a few hours but no issues, they're all back.
The only snag has been on Apple's part. In trying to bring back all my photos that I nuked off the phone, the live feature was lost on old photos that got transferred back into the camera roll. The data is there, the jpeg and the corresponding .mov file transferred, I can view both, and all of the metadata is correct. But apparently the linking is done at the point of capture, not after and not periodically repaired for situations like this. All to say every photo I've ever taken with my iPhone now has a still and a 3 second video, that cannot be recombined/relinked.
But ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, it's a goofy feature for a user to find missing I guess, definitely an edge case. But from what i can tell a lot of people have had similar problems on macs when importing live photos between devices. Haven't found a solution for it yet that will work on device. Hoping that apple will just add a fix in the background and it will go away. Ideally a repair task that could be started by the user similar to the duplicate feature in iOS photos. But it seems like they have bigger problems to fix. I'll probably just stop using live photos altogether and take more deliberate videos.
-Bruce