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Syncing iPhone photos with Syncthing
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syncthing-photo-sync.md

For those who prefer to avoid solutions like iCloud Photos and Dropbox for backing up photos, you can sync your iPhone photos with Syncthing. To do this, you'll need two things:

  • Möbius Sync is, to my knowledge, the only actively-maintained Syncthing client for iOS. It's free to sync up to 20 MB, and only $4.99 (one-time) to remove that limit.

  • PhotoSync is a nifty iOS app for syncing photos to a number of different destinations. It's free for low-quality transfers, and $6.49 annually for full-quality, background transfers.

First, configure Möbius Sync so that you're syncing a local folder somewhere. The key here is that we can add files to a folder exposed in Files.app, and changes to that folder will (eventually) be picked up by Möbius Sync and synced to whatever destination you've configured.

Second, configure PhotoSync to automatically transfer your photos to said folder. As I noted above, you can use the Autotransfer feature to automate this. Now you're done!

This setup is pretty simple, but I've been looking for it for a while and haven't seen it documented anywhere.

There are some caveats to this approach:

  • Unless you configure PhotoSync to delete photos after transfer, storage space consumed by photos on your device will double.

  • Synchronization is not instant; there's delay between (1) when PhotoSync copies your photos/videos to your Syncthing folder and (2) when Möbius Sync picks up changes to said folder.

  • Neither PhotoSync nor Möbius Sync are fully open source.

That being said, I think this approach still makes a lot of sense if you're concerned about your privacy or want to keep your data out of the cloud. Plus, the PhotoSync team says they're planning on adding an optional pre-sync encryption feature, which is neat if that's something you're interested in.

It's worth noting that the Möbius Sync team is working on getting photo upload working in the app eventually.

Update, 3 Feb 2024: When the backup on my phone gets too large, I move the backups out of the synced folder and configure PhotoSync to only back up photos newer than the current day. This has worked well enough so far.

@mrioan
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mrioan commented Nov 13, 2022 •
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I want to share how I managed to do this myself. This is the most automatic way I found:

  1. Install "LAN drive SAMBA Server Client" in your iPhone
  2. Start the SAMBA server
  3. Mount the SAMBA share in your machine. Something like:
mount -t cifs -o "domain=WORKGROUP,username=test,password=test,sec=ntlm,vers=1.0" \\\\192.168.1.100\\DCIM /mnt/smb_iphone
  1. Use rsync to sync your photos (your iPhone is the source):
rsync --info=progress2 -azv --delete /mnt/smb_iphone/ /mnt/my_drive/backup/iphone/photos/

BTW, LAN drive SAMBA Server Client limits the transfer speed for the free version. If you want full speed you have to buy the pro version

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