• 4 Posts
  • 141 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • Nah, self-hosting is still a solution. And when I self-host, I don’t even need an internet connection to access my files, movies, photos, security cameras, etc.

    Yes, we can fix privacy laws, and put in a lot of faith that they will be followed or that our data won’t be lost/sold. But I think everyone benefits when they are in control of their own data.

    What we need are more accessible self-hosting options so that even computer n00bs can set up and cut ties with these mega corps.








  • The number one thing that most of these don’t do well for me is the connection with banks.

    A bit of an anecdote, but i was a long-time user of Mint, which integrated with all my banks and credit cards, which was nice.

    When I decided to selfhost, I was disappointed that bank syncing wasn’t a thing, or it had these roundabout ways of working, or they simply didn’t support the banks and credit cards i use.

    So… I ended up wity Money Manager EX.

    Once i did the initial importing of my records, everything since has been manually entered.

    Now, this might seem tedious depending on how many transactions and accounts you manage, but it’s really not.

    Depending on how often you update your records, you can do an easy export/import of your transactions from your bank (usually a csv export). Doing this once a month isn’t terrible.

    I just manually enter all my transactions. Yes, more work, but also less frustration and it makes me feel more in touch with my spending.

    Even not having to worry about the hassle of syncing not working, or having to fix things like that is a huge weight off my shoulders.

    Anyway, just wanted to share my experience because bank syncing shouldn’t be a make-or-break thing.













  • I went through the same dilemma. The old Synology photo software had a duplicate finder, but they removed that feature with the “new” version. But even with the duplicate finder, it wasn’t very powerful and offered no adjustability.

    In the end, I ended up paying for a program called “Excire Foto”, which can pull images from my NAS, and can not only find duplicates in a customized and accurate way. It also has a localAI search that bests even Google Photos.

    It runs from windows, saves its own database, and can be used as read-only, if you only want to make use of the search feature.

    To me, it was worth the investment.

    Side note: if I only had <50,000 photos, then I’d probably find a free/cheaper way to do it. At the time, I had over 150,000 images, going back to when the first digital cameras were available + hundreds of scanned negatives and traditional (film) photos, so I really didn’t want to spend weeks sorting it all out!

    Oh, the software can even tag your photos for subjects so that it’s baked into the EXIF data (so other programs can make use of it).