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Comment by xenophonf | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, if you buy into their ecosystem, and then you're locked into their stuff. How many online photo archive systems have gone and went in the last 10 to 15 years? Or how many end up fucking with photo quality at some point? Or lock your account with no recourse? Etc. The cloud is just someone else's computer. I'd rather vendors like Apple gave us the ability to build our own private clouds instead of locking us into theirs.

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> I'd rather vendors like Apple gave us the ability to build our own private clouds instead of locking us into theirs.

They literally do. I have my iPhone 11 synced with my self hosted Nextcloud instance. It works pretty well.

can you link any article to do so, i would like to do same.

You're not locked in, though.

All my iCloud photos are also in /Users/ceejayoz/Pictures. iCloud is a backup and a way to not store ten years worth on your phone. Apple's quite happy to have you have a local copy of it all.

But it seems every year it gets a bit harder to store locally workout paying apple a monthly fee for iCloud. The UI in iTunes has stagnated while iCloud makes it super easy – for a price.

Plug your phone into your computer and back + pull photos off. Even with icloud I do that every 3-6 months for a secondary backup

Huh? My work iPhone cannot backup to iCloud for reasons. Wifi sync is enabled and it literally backs up to my windows desktop daily.

I can backup the phone just fine, but couldn't figure out a way to have all photos/videos on my computer and some on the phone (for when the total size exceeds the phone's capacity)

The UI on the computer may have stagnated, but it seems fine to me. Do we really need to change something that works?

On Mac OS iTunes completely disappeared, I wouldn’t say nothing changed.

How do you export or even sync your pictures with iCloud photos? Are they available as ‘normal’ file shares?

You can also install an app that syncs your photos to a third party. Or migrate your photos to Google now.

iCloud is the default, not the only option.

Yes, my phones have synced all my photos both to iCloud and Google for years now. It’s very unlikely that both will lose my data or prevent access at the same time.

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