you're here because you heard google photos will no longer have unlimited backup starting in
june 2021 or if you're watching this in the future you're looking for an alternative for
google photos because well you don't want to pay google to store your photos with that said
hello i am wanderer001 and this is going to be a review walkthrough of using plex media server as
a localized way to mimic what google photos could do for you plex itself is a powerful free software
that most people use to save their physical media location and digitize it so that they can watch it
but i'm going to show you how to use it as a roll your own backup solution for your photos so you
can have an alternative to google photos and any other cloud style photo backup services so this
will allow you to one keep your photos private but two also keep you in control of your photos first
i will say you will need the free plex software but you will also need a host for the plex
software whether that's an old computer a network attached storage device etc in my case i'm using
the drobo5n review over there in the corner if you're interested which will allow me to expand my
photo storage ability as time goes on and my needs increase so to start like i said you download your
plex software to your computer or network attached storage device and set that up this won't be a
tutorial for that you then download the plex app on your phone and this is the main screen that
we come to when we first launch plex we are going to come over to the hamburger button in the upper
left hand corner here you can see this is my main account we are going to select the settings
cog in the upper right and come down to camera upload selecting camera upload will allow us to
set up uploading from our smartphone by default it's going to ask us where we want to save this
so right now it's defaulting to mobile photos but we are going to change this to
a folder selection i have on my plex server called photos and i'm going to select back and hit next
after which we can select an album so we can leave it at none and what it will do is just dump
it into this folder that i have on my plex server selecting album will allow me to select any one of
the pre-existing albums that i've already made or i can select new album and i will call this
mobile photos and select create and then we're going to scroll all the way down here to the
bottom to make sure that it is selected and back up to the top back we've completed this we know
where it's going we're going to hit next we have a choice of upload automatically if i select this
what will happen is in the background photos will automatically upload when they can i prefer to
manually push the upload even when i use google photos i wanted to click on google photos first
and then have it go so i'm just going to leave this off for the time being you can always come
back and change these settings if you want to i'm going to hit next this is the important one
in google photos as well i disallowed uploading of photos over mobile data so i'm going to keep
that where it's i'm not going to use mobile data once we've made our determination we're going
to hit finish so this is the final screen once we've made our complete choices we can always hit
back and like i said coming to camera upload will let us come back here and adjust any of these that
we want so right now plex is not set to upload my stuff so i'm just going to hit that toggle
and i would hit start and it will look so i have only really two photos on my phone at the moment
but it's going to upload those to my server so here we've got the plex library the album it's
going to and then if i want to automatically do this or if i want to do this over mobile data so
selecting back and back one more time we're actually going to come into my photos and here
you can see the two photos that were remaining on my phone so that's the thing with google photos
what i would do is i would just upload it and once it was uploaded i would take it off my phone
to save room on my phone so what we're gonna do now is i'm gonna show you take a quick picture so
if you ever wonder what a youtuber's desk look like when they're not
actively hiding it or have green screen up there you go that's my running stuff
plex will also allow you to upload videos now depending on your setup at home your network
connection and the device that you're hosting plex on is how quickly the media from your
phone will make it to the plex server so we're going to stop and what we're going to do now
is i'm going to come back to my plex but it's not automatically throwing those into my plex
photos here what i have to do is i have to come over and we select settings camera upload
and then again i will click start again it found four and it's gonna upload those two remaining
now remember this last one is a video so it might take a little longer to do and again depending on
your network connectivity and size of the video that's how long that will actually take to do
so we're going to back out one more time and i'm going to come over to my photos i had to
give it a quick swipe down and a minute to load but here you can see those are the photos that
i just took while we were going over this now i slid the phone down because there's a photo in
there i don't want to show that has a date on it and some private information but here you can see
give it a moment this will be the photo that we just took and again the load speeds here are all
dependent on the server that you're running this on as well as your network at home so there you go
that's my desk with all my stuff in the upper right hand corner you've got the three dots you
can select this you can share this just like you would any other photo you can save this you can
select details now details will show you name where it came from basic information but also
a location on the map obviously i'm not showing you that because i don't want the location
shown you can screencast it you can favorite this and if we come at the top it will show you
where it was taken in a map but also related so here you go this was taken today it's kind
of thinking it looks like this but that's not quite quite right and then it's like
hey here's the rest of the photos that you just took and selecting down will shrink that down
so i'm just going to scroll that up a little bit to show you that down here there are different
types of view options right now i'm on the timeline so you can see there's a date and it's
grouping things together if you do recommended recent photos at the top photos from 2020 and
then photos from 2010. library is just going to be that raw data dump of the folders that i have
on my plex server now while this will not be as intricate as the ai that google has there
is a rudimentary tagging system so it does have a little bit of smarts if i come up here and type in
sky well here it's got sky bell automatic tagging for sky in a folder that i have called mobile
photos so this will actually allow you to search across your photos for rudimentary tagging like
you would have in your google photos so here's the thing now that i've shown you plex camera upload
or mobile backup there is a caveat just like google photos there is a price to use plex mobile
and that is you need to be a plex pass subscriber and the reason i say that as a small caveat is
that plex itself is a powerful piece of software that this mobile backup is only part of what
it can actually do and if you're interested in knowing the other things that plex can do for you
let me know in the comment section below and i'll be more than happy to do walkthroughs of all the
other things that i use plex 4 and have been using plex since i started cord cutting way back in 2009
with that said plex pass you can get it monthly you can get it annually or you can go all in
like i did and buy a lifetime pass and plex is always adding extra features and bonuses that
plex pass members have access to monthly plex is five dollars yearly plex is forty dollars or
lifetime plex pass is 120 all of those are for the plex pass when you do that in comparison to google
you're gonna get a hundred gigabytes two dollars a month or twenty four dollars a year 200 gigabytes
at three dollars a month or 36 dollars a year or two terabytes at 10 a month or 120 a year if you
opt for the lifetime plex pass your storage is limited only by the amount of space that
you have not by a third party the other thing to consider is that that number that cap that google
is telling you is for all of your google services that's your email that's your drive that's your
working documents and your photos plex for the price that you pay for plex it's for all those
extra services that plex offers but also unlimited photo backup which is why you're here one of the
last things to consider if you have a pixel phone pixel 5 will be the last one that will do this
google will allow you to continue to have high resolution photos uploaded to google photos high
resolution still is compressed plex is the raw photo from your phone so no compression at all
the raw photo is sent something to consider now i know i've thrown a lot of information
at you i know i kind of did a demonstration how to on how to actually do this pricing
it's really up to you like i've said i have been a plex pass member since before i was fully aware
of all the things that i could do with plex i just jumped right in i think if you're looking
for a backup solution this is one to consider there are lots of other things that it can do
hopefully you found some part of this useful in some way shape or form i have been wanderer 001
if you have any questions or comments please feel free to leave them in the area below and as always
thanks for watching if you found this video helpful consider giving it a like
as that will help other people find the video as well if you like what i'm doing here you can
always help fuel the next review by buying me a coffee link in the description below
last but not least if you want to be notified when i upload a new video you know what to do