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

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icloudpd can be run in a container or just your host machine. It's a little finnicky to get logins set up (and honestly I haven't done it in a few months), but once that is working you can automate a job to pull down a backup every day/week/month and delete files from icloud.

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Take a look at immich!

Does a lot of what you stated above. Plus, it has machine learning built in so you can use features like 'memories' and face detection, etc. I transitioned from Google photos to immich a little less than a year ago and haven't looked back!

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This isn't necessarily a 1:1 answer for you but it's just what I have experience with: I used Nextcloud for a period of time and set up the app to upload which worked like any basic cloud storage service but what I've done since (I downsized) is just use the PhotoSync app and it's companion on my PC. You can target a PC (like I do), WebDAV, FTP, SMB, etc. which may help with scalability.

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ente is pretty great.

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Thanks, I will take a look!
Am I right in thinking this will get you the photos but it is up to you to place them somewhere and put a service/app in front of that storage to make it usable? Usable as is; the family members can all access their own photos and view them as if it was on the Photos app from Apple?

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Does this chain need another service to make the photos 'usable' for all the family members? I am not seeking just a safe place to store photos I will delete from iCloud, these photos are (ideally) also still available to view on the phones of all family members.

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This is an interesting one. Seems this one has has the backend and frontend covered. Does ente take the photos from iCloud and then remove them to free up space on iCloud?

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I was considering nextcloud but was not sure if it would fit my needs, hence I asked the people here as I have seen a lot of people talk about nextcloud so I wanted to see if their experiences fit my needs.

Is nextcloud taking the pictures from iCloud and then delete them or dou you need to instruct nextcloud to do this or do you need to do that part manually?

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Nice, seems viable!
Does immich also take care of taking the pictures from iCloud and then remove them?

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AFAIK, not yet. I think they are working on adding the "free up space" capability but I think that may only remove them from the device not the cloud. However, I am on Android so not sure how that would work for iCloud. If you can't find the answers in their documentation, you can search or ask in their discord channel.

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I’ve been using Immich for a while now. It is amazing. Better than iPhotos and Google Photos.

One thing to note is that your photos are stored on disk unencrypted, so if anyone has access to your server, they have access to your photos. This can be partially mitigated with LUKS or some other full disk encryption, but unless you configure it with TPM, your server won’t be able to come up automatically.

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