This open-source file manager has great support for SMB file shares, so I made a shortcut to my “2021” photos folder where I can easily move all of my photos whenever I want.
The “FolderSync” app for Android sounds pretty good for automatically copying camera roll photos to the server, but I think I want to have more control over my photo library now, so I’m going to manually copy photos to the server periodically using “ Material Files“. In the Plex Forums, there are a couple of auto-sync recommendations. Still, I already have Plex, so let’s give it a try. The Plex apps have automatic Camera Roll Upload, too! This could be practically perfect… Oh wait, Plex is also removing the automatic Camera Roll backup feature in June of 2021. So if I remember to add the proper names to my folders, it’s pretty good. The search capability doesn’t do any image recognition like Google Photos does though, but it does search filenames and folder names. You can look at it in a “timeline” mode that just shows everything in sequence, or you can look at in the normal folder structure view, or there’s a “Recommended” view that shows some automatically selected samples from different decades or “on this day” from a past year. Plex has some cool view options for your photo library. It seems like maybe that would be a good way to access my photos remotely from the phone. So why don’t I just use Plex? I already have Plex for streaming videos and music throughout the house as well as remotely, but I never turned on the Photos aspect of the Plex server. Paying for that much storage on Google Photos would be $100 per month! I could just use Plex I still keep all of my full-resolution photos organized by year and day on my server, but having 13 terabytes of photos in the cloud was pretty nice, too.
It wasn’t perfect, but it was certainly better than nothing… and it was great to be able to see my full photo gallery from any phone. However, it was pretty great for searching my photo library since the image recognition worked pretty nicely. Personally, I never used Google Photos as my only backup, it was always just a 3rd level backup since the free version doesn’t save full-quality images. So you’re probably searching for alternatives to Google Photos, but none of the others recommended in all of these articles are really comparable to what Google Photos used to be, and none of them are free for unlimited storage either. From now on, you’ll have to pay for cloud storage for your photos. June 1, 2021, is the day that the free unlimited compressed photo backup & cloud storage on Google Photos ends.