Introduction

At first, I only used an iPhone 15 Pro to take photos. I shot only Live Photos rather than RAW, so storage was not much of a concern, with all my photos totaling just a few dozen GB. Later, I bought my first camera, a Sony ZV-E10, and always shot in JPG+RAW. I took considerably more photos with the camera than with my phone, but a 64GB card could still last a while, so storage pressure was not particularly high. A year later, I upgraded to a Fujifilm X-E5 and continued shooting in JPG+RAW. However, as the resolution increased from 24MP to 40MP, photo file sizes more than doubled. At the same time, I began experimenting with shooting S-Log/F-Log video, further increasing my storage needs. After that, I bought a DJI Osmo Action 5 Pro action camera and rekindled my interest in film photography, picking up an Olympus 35 RC and a Rollei 35 S. As a result, the types of media I work with have become much more diverse.

Storage

Currently, all my photos are stored and backed up on my NAS. The NAS consists of a mini PC and three 2TB TLC SSDs configured as an encrypted RAIDZ1 array, providing 4TB of usable capacity. To make post-processing more convenient, the photos on the NAS are shared over the local network via SMB and can be accessed directly as a network drive from different Windows devices. I also keep local cold backups of selected important photos. For photos taken with my phone, I have enabled end-to-end encrypted iCloud backups—not the service operated by Cloud Guizhou—while also freeing up space on the phone.

Consolidated Browsing

Because of storage limitations, I cannot import every photo and video taken with my cameras onto my phone. Some photos are therefore stored on my phones, including older ones, while others are kept on the NAS. To browse photos from all my devices conveniently across multiple platforms, I use the open-source project Immich. Immich can not only back up photos from different phones to the NAS but also consolidate camera photos by importing external libraries. It offers essentially all the features I need as well.

Backup

Because drives can fail, and because it is generally best to maintain an off-site backup for maximum data security, I use Kopia to automatically encrypt and back up the photos on my NAS to Google Drive, making full use of the free 5TB of cloud storage available to students.