I’ve set up a self hosted photo system with immich, and it works doing automatic backups of photos from the filesystem, eg using termux/cron, although it is a bit flakey. Immich also works for backup, but it’s less ideal.
iPhone seems to be a lot harder, backup in immich doesn’t work, it seems that iPhones have a complicated was of handling background tasks which make background backups very difficult.
Does anyone know a way of doing any kind of backup automatically, without plugging in a cable and without using iCloud?
Have you tried keeping immich active for the initial large photo backup so that the background task backup only has the newly taken photos to take care off?
I imagine you’ve checked the Immich faq already:
https://docs.immich.app/FAQ/#why-is-background-backup-on-ios-not-working
Yes I’ve tried following the FAQ, I’m trying to help family members to use it so we can collect photos together, and these hands-on tricks are a bit harder to convince people to do. An automatic background backup would be much easier
The only thing I can think of then is to get your family members to start curating the photos into different albums using the Immich app. That way the sync gets to work and you get the usage statistics of the app up higher allowing the background task to run. If you create some shared albums and ask them to contribute photos to them f.e.
Or simply telling them about your shared album and getting them to check it out using the app.