I tried photoprism and thought it was pretty neat feature-wise. If I recall correctly they even sort received photos in a sensible date-based structure automatically. Don’t think they have an official app but maybe some third party stuff; the web UI is mobile friendly though.

To talk backups, I’d deploy the thing using containers and then back up the volumes any way you like.

This may not be the ideal solution for you, especially due to lack of decent android support. The workflow would probably be something like take photo -> sync to protoprism to sort -> view in photoprism gallery, which may also be too convoluted for you. Also, I’m not sure what you mean by the last paragraph.

Round Sync with whatever remote (backend provider) you want supported by the underlying library rclone. They have self hosted remote options like FTP or something. If you want off site and privacy, create a crypted remote pointed to your off site backend remote. It acts as a wrapper to do end-to-end encryption.

Round Sync isn’t in any app store, so I’d set a watcher for releases on Github. You can setup scheduled backups or restores in Round Sync to keep things moving between your phone and backend remote as a relatively set it and forget it for one way syncing.

It has some nuances with bidirectional syncing that can result in data loss if not careful. With your workflow, I recommend something like a daily copy job from your phone to the server. This never deletes files. When you curate your photos via a tool on the backend remote (only do this when all photos on your phone are on the backup server), then you can do a manual sync from the backend remote to your phone to match the two exactly.

Copy just copies or updates to newer versions from target 1 to target 2.

Sync does the same but also deletes any files on target 2 that are not on target 1. Very easy to delete files if not careful in planning out your workflow. Test first.

I use Backblaze B2 for my off site remote which only hides and doesn’t delete files with the default settings. You can manage those with the rclone CLI application on a desktop to later cleanup hidden files or set them to delete after X days or something in the b2 life cycle settings on the Backblaze website.

Its no Google Photos or Dropbox, but it works well enough for me without giving up privacy. It also decouples the syncing from curating of photos giving some additional freedom for a custom workflow.

I personally just have a daily copy job on my phone from my phone to a crypted b2 remote and a cron on my self hosted server to copy from b2 to my self hosted server. Once a year I might clean things up from my server, do a manual sync to b2, then another to my phone. Sometime later I’ll go clean up the hidden (deleted) files in b2.

That said, I care more about backups than bidirectional syncing, so your milage may vary with this solution for your use case.

This repo may help: https://github.com/meichthys/foss_photo_libraries

This is a great question. The photo ecosystem is one where I haven’t found a FOSS soln that hits all the marks of subscription services. I would focus on whatever helps you search.

I do feel like if files have accurate dates in the file system and in metadata, then folders based on event make sense.

However subscription photo services are very good at automatically sorting - these dates are holidays so these pictures are probably for that holiday. Your home location is here, these pictures are over there so this must be your trip to there. These pictures have these people or animals, so these pictures are about them.

With that comes seamless integration across devices - a picture taken at time now can be seen on a tv or laptop at time +x. Etc.

I have left the FOSS photo world but am definitely interested to see where it is. With digital photography finding pictures is the real trick. using folders like a tag hierarchy at least gets you in the ball park imo. But I have no practical knowledge any more.