the apple walled garden and paying monthly BS
Paying for internet services started bothering me a few months ago. Stories of lost data from the big providers have become more common (or at least reaching a broader audience). Cloud storage options that were supposed to be unthinkably stable and secure don't give much confidence anymore. I remember reading about one lady who last her entire photo collection on Google Photos. Over 15 years of photos just poof. Gone. And Google being a massive entity of thousands of people, there's no one invested to actually give a fuck and locate that data for her. Just some customer service person replying on the forums to tell her to check her trash folder so they can clear their tickets for the day.
For a long time I used iCloud photos but got tired of getting shilled for $3 every month. So I setup Immich, a self hosted photo cloud project.
This setup is what I expect to use longterm as it has so many benefits.
- All of my data never leaves my home network. My phone has Tailscale setup to directly "tunnel" straight to my server from any network. The photo data never lands in a corporate 3rd party's hands where they can either lose it or train whatever latest AI nonsense theyre cooking up.
- I know exactly how it's being stored and who has access (no one but me)
- I can get really granular about the setup. Want low res thumbnails generated by your server and sent back to my phone for easier previewing? Want offline facial and object recognition with text search? Want to just dump any file type including video or raw and generate a compatible high res file for your specific device? Duplicate detection? All that can be done and configured.
The one limitation is that Immich is not in a stable release. There are very frequent updates and some features can cause crashes. Particularly on the iPhone app. But it works, its free, and it keeps getting better. The stability of the iPhone app bothered me a bit for everyday use so I decided to try and modify my setup to have the last few months of photos and a few albums stored in iCloud, just to use the default photo app that comes with iOS which is super stable. I had already migrated everything out of iCloud and cleared out all the data and had switched to the free plan. So my photos needed be imported back.
It turns out that importing photos into iCloud is huge pain, basically impossible. There are only two ways to get anything into iCloud photos.
- If the photo is in your camera roll, you can turn on the icloud backup in settings and your good to go.
- Add the photo via the web interface.
Using Immich I don't need a local copy on my iPhone anymore, so I deleted it all. To try and get back into the walled garden I tried the first option. At first I copied all the photos/videos to the DCIM folder directly. But the Photos app wont read it in or display it. If you copy the photos to a folder where the "Files" app can see it, you can then (on the iPhone) choose to save it to the camera roll. Not bad, but this makes two copies of the data, and more importantly CLEARS ALL THE METADATA. All of it. No dates, no time, no location, nothing. It will show in the camera roll as being taken a few seconds prior. Embarrassingly bad. Not a real option with over 40,000 photos/videos spanning many years.
So the second method, just log in to their website and dump it all in there. Apple photos use the .heic format, and the videos are in .mov format. I have tons in that and jpegs, pngs, mp4s, avi, some raw, a bunch of stuff. It turns out that the uploading directly to icloud only supports jpeg. Not Apple's heic, just fucking jpeg. And only jpeg, no video support at all. Apple is valued at almost 4 trillion dollars and they don't support uploading a photo asset to their cloud service in their format?
It's intentional, it has to be right? The apple ecosystem and walled garden and whatever. I can understand trying to subtly trap users so they keep using your service and how that's good for business. But how is keeping users out of the garden good for business? Especially people that want in. I don't get the reasoning behind it. "No one gets in or out!" So to get into the ecosystem I have to have own iPhone and exclusively use their photos app as the photos are taken to accurately add anything to their cloud. I don't think I'm on the fringe of people's experiences with iCloud either. If someone used an android for years and years and paired it with google photos but chose to join the darkside they would be unable to get in and switch to iCloud. Or in my case, I was fully in. I took the red pill and explored a bit of what else could be. I came back to get the door slammed in my face like I cheated on a lover.
I now have a full aversion and general ick of paying a monthly fee. Just let me buy the thing. I don't want to rent my data storage for the rest of my life for a few bucks a month with the off chance that it gets zeroed over because "oops idk check your trash maybe?". Never going back to Apple for cloud storage. Immich all the way. Once this iPhone breaks I'm fully jumping ship and getting a used Galaxy S21.