Tutorial – Immich

Today's widely used digital cameras and smartphones have made our photos more accessible and easier to distribute. As a result, nowadays it isn't difficult for an photography amateur (or really anyone) to create a personal gallery with 1TB or more of multimedia.

To help manage all of your photos, popular services such as Dropbox, Google Photos, and Apple's iCloud Photos support photo gallery management and provide tools like duplicate removal and advanced image editing with AI. However, there are several potential risks when you store personal photos in the cloud, even with big, established services. The first potential risk is privacy – cloud services can potentially scan and analyze images for their own purposes and extract sensitive information.

Data breaches are another serious potential problem: A cloud service can be hacked, and information can be stolen and used for resale, AI deepfakes, or document forgery. Another risk is that photos or videos can sometimes be damaged or deleted due to hardware or software issues. One of the biggest problems is the lack of user control: Users can't necessarily just "take it all with them" if they decide to switch cloud services or leave them altogether. There are often no tools to import all their photos from one cloud provider to another with all their ratings, tags, comments, and highlights. If a user removes images from the cloud, there's no guarantee that all their data has been permanently deleted from the cloud service.

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