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

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Not sure if this is the right place but lets give it a go.

We have a family account on iCloud so all iPhones (5 of them) can sync items on the phones to their laptops and so forth. One feature that is eating all the storage space we have on iCloud and that would be Photo's. We ran out of space and thus Backups, Photos, Contacts, etc. will not sync anymore. We can add more space in iCloud but I am not keen on keeping buying storage space with Apple.

So my thought was to have all Photo's older then xyz days/months/years stored somewhere else to free up space in that iCloud account. I do not want to delete these older photo's, just have them stored somewhere else but still accessible. So ideally I would be able to tell some app/solution to move photo's from a phone to something self hosted and the user of that phone can then keep seeing the photo's in either the Photos app or the app related to the self hosted solution.

Honestly, even more ideal would be to 'tell' the Photos app from Apple to use the self hosted storage and not the iCloud storage. This would make the transition transparent to all the family members. Some features might no longer work (that 'memories' feature perhaps?) but that is OK, being able to store photo's is more important.

Apologies if this has been asked before but my searching, which is admittedly is not that great from my side, found no answer I could translate to my issue. Any help is appreciated!

FYI, I am running Docker at home and can make services available on the internet with ngnix in front of it as proxy. I can also run a new service of course, the self hosting bit as it were.

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ICloudpd to get the photos from the cloud.

Photosync app to sync photos to a share. This app is awesome. I think to sync full photos it’s a one time 5$ payment. I’ve synced 70,000 photos and videos so I know it’s worth it.

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