I’ve set up a self hosted photo system with immich, and it works doing automatic backups of photos from the filesystem, eg using termux/cron, although it is a bit flakey. Immich also works for backup, but it’s less ideal.
iPhone seems to be a lot harder, backup in immich doesn’t work, it seems that iPhones have a complicated was of handling background tasks which make background backups very difficult.
Does anyone know a way of doing any kind of backup automatically, without plugging in a cable and without using iCloud?
Works just fine for me in iOS 26. Altought sometimes it doesnt do it automatically in bg and I have to open the app
Are you opening it manually? Unfortunately I need to get it working set and forget if possible. And I’m trying to avoid icloud
Why set&forget? You never open your gallery?
iOS devices are pretty horrible at keeping a background task going unless apple owns it. Probably why they can get great battery life, but also seems pretty anti competitive. Not even google’s photo backup works well unless you manually open the app once in a while.
They do work, but Apple has a shitty system of ranking apps based on usage for background keep alive.
The more you open the app. the higher it’ll rank in priority and background upload will work.
That is very much the problem here, I would like to set up a set-and-forget system for family members so we can collect photos together easily. But that goes against how apple systems work
Aahhh i see, in that case, replave for them the default gallery app icon with immich; they won’t notice :D
Yeah, one of the reasons I still prefer android.