How to self-host your photo and video library
Self-hosting means your photos and videos live on a computer you own instead of a company's servers. It sounds technical, but the idea is simple, and the pieces are more affordable than most people expect.
What you need
A self-hosted library has four parts:
- A computer that stays on. It can be a NAS (a small storage box made for this job), a mini PC, or an always-on desktop. It doesn't need to be powerful for storage alone. AI features like search and face grouping run better with more memory and a modern processor.
- Storage. Enough disk space for your library today, plus room to grow.
- Software. The library app itself, which organises, searches and serves your photos to your phone and computer.
- A backup. Another copy somewhere else. This part is not optional.
How much storage?
A rough guide: a modern phone photo is 2 to 5 MB, and a minute of 4K video is 300 to 400 MB. A family library of 50,000 photos and a few hundred videos often lands between 300 GB and 1 TB. Video is usually what fills the disk. Plan for at least twice what you have today.
Backups: the 3-2-1 rule
The single most important habit is keeping more than one copy. The long-standing rule of thumb:
- 3 copies of your data,
- on 2 different kinds of storage,
- with 1 copy somewhere other than your home.
A second drive in the same machine protects you from a failed disk. It won't help with a fire, a flood or theft. An off-site copy can be a drive at a relative's house, or encrypted cloud storage where the provider only ever sees scrambled data.
Getting photos in automatically
A self-hosted library is only useful if new photos arrive without effort. A good setup backs up your phone's camera roll automatically, ideally only on Wi-Fi so it doesn't eat into your mobile data.
Reaching your library away from home
The safest approach is to keep the server off the open internet and connect through a private network, such as a VPN that links your devices to home. Opening your server directly to the internet works, but it means keeping it patched and watched.
The trade-offs
You are responsible for the hardware, the updates and the backups. In return, nobody else holds your library, there is no monthly storage bill that rises as your library grows, and no company can change its terms, raise prices or shut down with your photos inside.
Where Top Drawer fits
Top Drawer is a self-hosted library for photos and videos, with apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac and the web, with Android, Windows and Linux apps in development. It includes automatic camera-roll backup and private AI that runs on your own server or computer, or even a virtual server at a provider you choose and trust. We'll publish exact hardware requirements before launch.