Free and Open Source Software

I use Syncthing for transfering the photos from my phone to my computer and Photoprism to manage the actual photographs. I believe there are better alternatives than Syncthing for photo transfer, but I was already using it, so eh

I keep my devices (phone and tablet) in sync with my PC with Syncthing-Fork for android. This fork has the ability to stay offline most of the time and only come online during specific times, to safe battery.

That method would allow you to sync any new pictures from your phone with your PC once you connect to your local network. Managing and editing the photos would be the next question.

I recently went through getting all of my photos (tens of thousands) out of Apple's clutches. For me, the answer was https://photostakeout.com/ to get them all back to my local machine in a reasonable format, and then https://www.digikam.org/ to manage them. The nice thing (for me) is that Digikam runs fine on Mac but will let me migrate easily (I hope!) to Linux when I finally toss this laptop in the river.

As far as syncing, it's less elegant: connect the device to the laptop, and manually drag the photos over. But I can live with that. Avoiding the big player centralized clouds is important to me. I use https://www.backblaze.com/ to make sure I have an offsite backup of everything, just in case. So rather than the workflow be

Camera => Central Library => Download and manage on laptop

it's now

Camera => Laptop => background backup to central location

I run an unRAID server and use the PhotoPrism docker to manage my library. PhotoSync on iPhone imports via WebDav to my NextCloud docker (so both NextCloud and PhotoPrism can access pictures).

It’s a project to setup, but once it’s setup it just works, and I own all of my own data.

I use syncthing on Android with synctrazor on windows to sync my photos between phone and desktop. Then just use default photo viewers on each native system. Backed up on protondrive.