I woke up this morning to a lovely little gallery of pictures of our children that my wife had sent me via WhatsApp.

This has become the most common way we interact with family photos. We regularly send and receive photos to and from our families via WhatsApp, which re-compresses them for transit and temporary storage across their network.

The original photos, wherever they are, will be in a very high quality (as you get on most modern cameras) and will be backed up in perfect fidelity to either Apple or Google‘s photo storage solutions. But all of that seems moot, when the most frequent way we engage with the pictures is via a method which compresses so aggressively that you can clearly see the artefacts, even thumbnailed on a phone screen.

I still don’t feel particularly happy with the solution in place for backing up the photos (or even: getting them off the phone). Both Apple and Google make it less than convenient to get them out of their respective walled gardens. I’ve been evaluating the nextCloud app and a Nextcloud instance on my home NAS as a possible alternative.