There is no limit to how many photos you can add in an individual bucket, and of course you can create an unlimited number of albums and folders from within the app to organize your content.
This app is a lot more than just a file browser like FileZilla, it offers quick previews, geolocation searches, AI image tagging and much more, so it keeps its own database of this metadata. For this reason, you can’t add photos directly to the bucket using other apps. You must use the app or the browser version to upload and manage your photos. The photos are of course only stored on storj and not on our servers.
Please send a quick email to support if you’re not seeing your photos deleted from your bucket once you delete it from the app so we can investigate it. Please note though, due to deduplication, the photo will only be deleted if that same photo hasn’t been added to another album.
Regarding privacy, can you tell me whether the photos are encrypted at the client side?
Would you have access to the decryption keys and therefore access to my photo library?
Sorry, one more question:
I have tried to sync one of my photo albums, but the app is requesting me to connect to WiFi. I have unlimited data on my mobile plan.
Is there a number of photos above which WiFi is required. Can this be removed?
My point was that I don’t want to put all my photos into the same bucket but I would like to be able to access them all from the same app.
Please answer the privacy question because the way files are uploaded within the browser makes me think they are being processed on your server and not client side. That is important information to know.
If you’re using AI for tagging then this is something I’m not very comfortable with, tbh.
You could make multiple Photos+ accounts I suppose, but currently it’s only possible to configure it with one bucket only.
Some things are of course processed by server side processes such as AI image tagging. However, there is no permanent storage of these photos. On browser uploads, a server process creates optimized versions which are then uploaded to your bucket, and then these temporary files are immediately deleted.
It’s best to think of this app as a Google Photos alternative that uses your own cloud storage. If you want just a pure storage of photos, then apps like FileZilla are better suited for this purpose.
I’m looking for an alternative to Mega, not Google Photos. Which means client side processing is a requirement.
I think the majority of people using Storj are going to be interested in security over everything else. Unfortunately, all the benefits of using Storj seem to be erased by using your app.
It’s a shame. I’ll keep testing it for a while, just not with any photos that I really wouldn’t want to end up in the public domain.
Well your photos are private, they are only stored in your own bucket and only you can ultimately access them. They are not publicly stored anywhere else.
For a pure storage solution though, there are many other options. This recent blog posting highlights some of the apps recommended by Storj.
You can enable mobile/cellular uploads. Tap the … in the upper right of the Sync screen and select the option to allow mobile/cellular uploads. Thank you.
Just downloaded app on iPhone and setup sync of my Cameraroll to a new bucket on storj.
Storj setup was quite easy (if you are familiar with S3 and storj already)
App is not too intuitive that you have to create a “album” and add photos to it.
Not sure if it will continue to sync my camera roll as I selected everything to be put in the album i created, but we’ll see…
Subscription automatically added when i setup storj as S3 provider with expiry in 365 days.
Update later when sync of 2500 items are complete.
Well ultimately anything you upload to any cloud provider, be it icloud, dropbox, google drive, or s3 providers, can ultimately be accessed by a rogue employee who works at that company. The only way to 100% store something in the cloud where no one can ever access it is to encrypt the file client side before uploading it to the cloud provider.
Thank you for comments. I think the app will become very intuitive if you view it more as a dropbox (but optimized for photos) instead of just a Google Photos (GP) alternative. Photos have to be stored in albums and can then be further organized into folders unlike GP which just puts everything under a library section.
To automatically add and upload future photos you take, remember to enable this option on a top level album. Long press on the album and enable auto import. Then each time you open the app, it will automatically add any new photos you have taken to this album. Remember to of course sync each time so the new photos get uploaded to the cloud as well.
Status is - it uploaded 21 photos to storj, and stopped. Restart of app, force app stop and restart etc. couldn’t make it resume, just halted at 2013 items remaining.
Deleted bucket, reset storage in app and trying again.
Is your iCloud Photo library set to “Optimize Photo Storage”? If its set this way, then if the original photo is not on your phone but only stored on iCloud, the app will need to force it to download from iCloud to your phone before it can then upload it. Sometimes this can take a bit of time, so my suggestion is give it at least 1 min before stopping it or killing the app to see if it continues the backup process.
Other issues could be a temporary bad wifi connection, or perhaps the s3 storage service being down (though that’s less likely as they are very reliable).
You can see which photo is set to be uploaded next by tapping the red cloud icon under the Library section. If for some reason its stuck on a specific photos (because for example it may be stuck getting it from iCloud), you can remove that photo so the process can complete and then try adding it back later.
I don’t use iCloud for photos - been using OneDrive for a while - and it’s not deleting photos from my device. Waited for 5-10 minutes, no change.
Unlikely - it’s a 1G connection, 3,5 meters from the AP - speedtest results 510/480Mbit on that device. No packet loss.
I’ve reset once again, and just added 3 pictures for sync, that worked. Took a picture with the camera, and it uploaded as expected - great.
Re-added all my photos, and now it’s stuck at same place.
When tapping the red cloud, I can’t figure out how to de-select the next item (troublemaker). If i click the first picture, it gets a red frame, does that equal skip?
The website and app now reports I have 47 items in my album, but only 4 is available:
I’ve cleared cache, deleted everything in the bucket manually, reset storage - but still stuck at 2013 remaining when restarting once more.
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Bonus question, been trying as an alternative to connect to a MinIO S3 endpoint as well - reports "Unable to access bucket " for all available buckets, new - already existing and populated etc. Works fine from other applications ? Does it not support MinIO?
Ok great, it might have been because of a single corrupted photo. It happens sometimes. Restarting the phone can sometimes clear these issues too.
It should work with any s3-compatible storage. The only requirements are that the access key/secret must allow List Bucket access (so it can show you the buckets to choose from) and you can only select an existing empty bucket. If a bucket already has files in it, then it’s not available for selection from within Photos+.
The website will only show you photos that have been synced. It won’t show you any of the pending photos that have been selected for upload within the app but not yet uploaded.
To me, it shouldn’t be the user’s job to restart or remove anything from the queue manually.
It’d be better if the app could detect that no activity happened for a while on a file so it can skip it and carry on with the rest.
It could try failed items later, and eventually warn the user if some items failed after several tries… Then the user could decide to investigate why a few items failed, but at least the rest would have been synced correctly, and the app wouldn’t get stuck.
Filezilla does that with its queue system for instance.
