Photograph is my hobby, i like photo detail so i use high resolution camera. This ends with a lot of storage. Local storage is not a big deal, but i want to put them on Cloud so i can access it anywhere.
I started with ICloud Photos with 200GB plan this is good for about a year then My ICloud is full and i need to upgrade to the next plan. The next plan is 2TB , it will cost 10.99 a month. My 200GB plan is only $2.99. Why there is no such plan like 500GB or 1TB. I started to look for some self hosting.
In the past, i have tried some self hosting solution but they don’t really work at the scale i have.
What i need: a self hosting with mobile app.
I googled and found some recommendation , it’s Immich (https://immich.app/) , i tried and it’s more than I expected , it’s almost a version of google. It can do face detection, location mapping, natural search …. and it also has Mobile App where it can automatically sync all your phone/photos.
I couldn’t be happier. It’s a docker based app, if you are running on Linux, it will only take 5 minutes to setup.
There is a small issue. In other to access your photos from internet you need to configure your home router to do the forwarding to expose your photo gallery to internet. I’m not confident to do this as bad guys can scan and see your application, if this app has some vulnerability , they can take over your data/network.
Also reconfigure the router require some network knowledge , it’s not an easy task.
Luckily, i found that Cloudflare has a Tunnel solution. Basically you need to install Cloudagent in your machine, this agent will communicate with cloudflare to expose your application to internet. It’s secure via https. The configuration will take about 30 minutes to understand how it works and 5 minutes to setup. Google Cloudflare Tunnel
This is the old setup: You – > Router -> Immich Photo App
The new setup: You -> cloudflare -> Cloudflare Agent -> Immich Photo App
The 2 solutions solved my problems. Give it a try.