OV9

Could equally have been posted in the Moaning section, but spurred on by Google complaining that we were over the storage allocation (and unable to buy more for just one account, and not fancying going from £0/month to £126/month) I have started a digitial declutter of our pictures and music.

For local storage I can recommend dupeGuru (freeware) which is doing an admirable job of finding duplicates (more than a decade's worth of "I can't remember if we copied this before", rebuilt laptops, replaced phones, etc.). For data on Google Drive DupeGuru was too slow, the analysis time was predicted to stretch into weeks, which I didn't have, so ended up paying for FileRev which connects to your Google Drive and does the analysis at pace. It analyses content as well as time, date, name and gives you a percentage match. A few test samples showed it was spot on.

So far I've deleted 350k+ files and freed up about 1TB of storage. Part of the problem was that the replication software that copies data from Google Photos to Google Drive (and from there it is synced to my NAS) had somehow got its knickers in a twist and started creating endless copies, rapidly filling the space.

Cheers Alex, I need to do something similar with my Google account, as apparently it's at 93% capacity

At least you've got a bit of time!

I paid $30 for a month's sub with FileRev. There are cheaper tiers, but it depends on how much you've got to delete.

Spent the last few months on and off going through our Google Drive folders and manually deleting items which are basically superfluous. Every time my wife’s phone content gets copied to it, we end up with a few hundred more pics of coffee cups (“Oohhh Costa have Christmas cups out now!….” FFS), tops/dresses/cardigans, random website screen prints and so on. Drives me mad

So, after much faffing and whatnot, I've now got a Lenovo M920q running ESXi running a virtual Synology DS923+ running Immich in a container. That's a lot of running.

I initially wanted to run Synology Photos, but I found it too functionally limited and idiosyncratic in its function (why default to folder view instead of timeline and not make it a user setting to choose? )

There's undoubtedly a slicker way (Proxmox and a container running directly on the hypervisor), but this is what my limited Linux/UNIX/docker skills could manage without losing sight of the core objective: having a Google Photos alternative for our pictures and videos up and running in a relatively short timeframe.

Immich is very impressive, and currently chugging along doing all the facial recognition, smart search indexing and the like. In use it is very similar to Google Photos, but with the added benefit that all data is stored locally.

I've not enabled it for external access, and won't. We're not getting away from Google, so this is a backup option. Pictures will be backed up as soon as the phones connect to the WiFi.