Not sure if this is the right place but lets give it a go.
We have a family account on iCloud so all iPhones (5 of them) can sync items on the phones to their laptops and so forth. One feature that is eating all the storage space we have on iCloud and that would be Photo’s. We ran out of space and thus Backups, Photos, Contacts, etc. will not sync anymore. We can add more space in iCloud but I am not keen on keeping buying storage space with Apple.
So my thought was to have all Photo’s older then xyz days/months/years stored somewhere else to free up space in that iCloud account. I do not want to delete these older photo’s, just have them stored somewhere else but still accessible. So ideally I would be able to tell some app/solution to move photo’s from a phone to something self hosted and the user of that phone can then keep seeing the photo’s in either the Photos app or the app related to the self hosted solution.
Honestly, even more ideal would be to ‘tell’ the Photos app from Apple to use the self hosted storage and not the iCloud storage. This would make the transition transparent to all the family members. Some features might no longer work (that ‘memories’ feature perhaps?) but that is OK, being able to store photo’s is more important.
Apologies if this has been asked before but my searching, which is admittedly is not that great from my side, found no answer I could translate to my issue. Any help is appreciated!
FYI, I am running Docker at home and can make services available on the internet with ngnix in front of it as proxy. I can also run a new service of course, the self hosting bit as it were.
I was considering nextcloud but was not sure if it would fit my needs, hence I asked the people here as I have seen a lot of people talk about nextcloud so I wanted to see if their experiences fit my needs.
Is nextcloud taking the pictures from iCloud and then delete them or dou you need to instruct nextcloud to do this or do you need to do that part manually?
Oh no, I don’t think it would be able to pull from iCloud directly, I believe there is an option to delete uploaded photos on the iOS device after uploading in the Nextcloud app but I don’t know if that is automatic or requires the user to acknowledge a prompt unfortunately.
Ok, thanks. I think that the combo Immich and icloudpd seems to be a way forward for now as that combo seems to be able to download iCloud files to local (my server) and delete them from iCloud. Once on my server I can move them to Immich and that should just about be it. Famous last words, I know, but I think it will be fine.