This morning when driving back from the shops I heard someone in a podcast say that his fourteen year old niece was disgusted at the thought of using a laptop rather than a mobile phone and it made me think of something. In the age of iOS and Android devices replacing computers it makes sense to setup Raspberry Pi as Nextcloud servers, photoprism servers, Pi Holes and more. It makes sense becaue if we move away from the laptop and the desktop then we come across a serious limitation.
When you take photos on an iphone or other such device it’s easy to take photos and never organise them, unless you share specific photos with specific people. Images are automatically organised by time, date, month, location and people by photo apps but this is just an illusion of organisation.
By playing with Photoprism, Nextcloud, OneCloud, MyCloud (the Swisscom one), Immich and others I have often come across the same problem.
Almost two decades ago we had Google Latitude. Google Latitude allowed us to share real time location with friends and family 24 hours a day. We didn’t need to ask “Where are you” because there was already an app for that. Today I saw “Google’s real-time location is here: this is how it works” as a headline. I have to ask, do the writers study their history before writing their articles or is anything that wasn’t in their own lifetime brand new?
Yesterday when I tried to migrate nextcloud between two locations I used one that I installed from scratch and when I got to another network I was unable to use it. In the evening when I got home I re-installed Nextcloud but this time I used the NextcloudPi package, rather than installing it myself. I tested sudo raspi-config and went to change the SSID. When I saw that I could do this I decided that it was safe for another experiment this morning.
I had a theory that if I wanted to I could transport a raspberry pi running ubuntu server from one place to another and connect by wifi, with a little tweak, or by ethernet if that didn’t work and today that thought was proved wrong. I spend at least an hour experimenting, before calling it a day, because of lunch time, rather than a loss of desire to find a solution.
When some people see that it’s grey or rainy they don’t want to go for a walk. They don’t want to get rained on and they don’t want to experience the discomfort of being in a wet environment. I don’t mind the rain. I don’t mind wearing a rain coat and rain trousers, and waterproof shoes, and ensuring that I don’t need to fiddle with the phone when my hands are wet with rain.
When experimenting with the Immich iPhone app I found it impossible to upload beyond 15,000 images and I supposed that it was because the phone timed out before it had checked all the previous files before moving on to the last four thousand images. In reality the problem is that Immich downloads the media from iCloud and leaves it on the phone. The result is that if you have one hundred gigabytes of photos on iCloud you need one hundred gigabytes of storage ony your phone.
Since getting the Raspberry Pi devices my shift has moved from following tutorial after tutorial to experimenting with setting up a number of server projects fron Home Assistant to Nextcloud to Photoprism and Immich to name a few. In the process I have instantiated and then pulled down plenty of instances before finally deciding to keep certain instances up and running for longer, to see whether I can use them. I also experimented with CUPS and set up a printer/scanner for remote use.
Last night I installed Immich on an HP laptop with ease. The issue I came up against is that laptops sleep and hibernate after a few minutes unless you are actively using them. This means that you need to use them whilst files are being transferred if you do not want tasks to be interrupted. That’s why, this morning I decided to try installing immich on two different raspberry Pi devices.
While playing with Nextcloud I found a serious flaw. If you add images via the command line from one directory to another, and then delete them, then their ghosts remain in the timeline. By ghosts I mean references to these files in the CMS and there is no quick way of removing them. You need to remove them individually and that’s time consuming. That’s why, when I was trying to find a solution I came across Photoprism.