Need a self hosted solution to offload old Photos's from iPhones to make space in iCloud for new ones

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I'm not sure they have a way to do that automatically. It's more of an alternative to Google Photos or iCloud.

My wife and I were each running out of space on Google Photos and used Google's takeout function to get all of our pictures from Google and then bulk upload them to my self-hosted ente instance. I'm not sure if/how Apple offers that kind of functionality.

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Immich full stop, like everyone else has said. self hostable so as much storage as you can buy (and maintain backups of!), AI so you can search your photos like "sunset on beach", and just rock solid, despite it """technically""" still in pre-release stage

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Right, this is for the “hard” part of getting your content out of iCloud in an automated fashion. You’d then put the content in storage locally and use photoprism or immich or a similar self hosted gallery to be able to access them

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Ok, I understand. How did you manage the pictures taken on phones after the move to ente? Perhaps once in a while bulk transfer them manually? Or perhaps tell the camera app to start using ente (if such a thing is even possible)?

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I'm on Android, so I can't speak to how iPhones handle it, but installed the ente app on the phones, pointed it to my instance and picked which folders on the phone to keep backed up.

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Immich seems a real good option!
And I am starting to believe that moving pictures from iCloud to another solution to free up space might have to involve another type of system/service unfortunately. Also seems that the Photos app on the iPhone has no options to use something else as storage, it uses local storage and iCloud storage.

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Seems Immich is quite popular and also seems like something I could start to use.
If only we could point the Photos app to Immich or have Immich download and remove images which are older and could be moved to Immich.

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Aha! I'm starting to get the picture.
icloudpd to download to my server and Immich (or something like that) to use these downloaded images.

Oh boy, this is not going to be a 1-click whambalam fix is it?

Ah well, gives me something to do and look into, it can be considered fun as well of course!

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Correct but there are really only 2 parts (3 if you’re adding a front-facing proxy which it sounds like you know how to do). If you’re using something like truenas or proxmox there are prebuilt containers for both iCloudpd and immich/photoprosm/whatever and even if not both have generic Docker containers or can be run out of their own repo checkout. So you just need:

iCloud <—> local folder via icloudpd
local folder <—> local web front end with immich
local web <—> public web with your proxy or cloudflare setup

Good luck!

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Immich does have a command line uploader, and you can download photos 1000 at a time from the iCloud website. It’s an extremely tedious process, especially when your mom has 130,000 photos to migrate, and she’s not techie enough to do it herself.

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Exactly as I had it in my head atm!
This setup is very clear to me and doable. Thanks for all your help and suggestions!

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Understood.
And please accept my belated sympathy for your endeavor with your mom's Library of Congress sized photo ~~album~~ vault, that must have been tiring.

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Thanks. It took about 10 minutes to do each set of 1000 photos, because she wanted to keep both the originals and the modified versions, so 2000 individual per 1000 photos. It took roughly 22 hours to do them all, which I did over the span of about four days. I never want to do that again! xD

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I have implemented what you’re looking for using Immich on my wife’s iPhone.

Immich backs up the “Recents” album - which means it backs up everything. What’s important to remember is that it backs it up, not syncs it. This allows me to delete photos from the iPhone and they stay in the Immich library. This is how I keep my wife’s phone from running out of storage.

Works well for us so far, even if I have to manually delete the photos off the phone from time to time.

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Not from iCloud, just from the phone’s local storage. So, to backup all of iCloud from the phone, those photos would have to be downloaded to the phone first.

Alternatively, you can download all the photos from iCloud to a computer, then upload those photos manually to the Immich web interface.

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Oh no, I don't think it would be able to pull from iCloud directly, I believe there is an option to delete uploaded photos on the iOS device after uploading in the Nextcloud app but I don't know if that is automatic or requires the user to acknowledge a prompt unfortunately.

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That is a good method it seems. So Immich has a feature to backup iCloud/Photos files and use these images. If so then deleting is the only thing left. Did you ever consider using icloudpd to do the transfer of files and have that also delete the files in iCloud? That seems like a solution where you are no longer required to manually delete the files anymore.

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Ok, thanks. I think that the combo Immich and icloudpd seems to be a way forward for now as that combo seems to be able to download iCloud files to local (my server) and delete them from iCloud. Once on my server I can move them to Immich and that should just about be it. Famous last words, I know, but I think it will be fine.

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Need a self hosted solution to offload old Photos's from iPhones to make space in iCloud for new ones