I use a burner phone whenever I leave the country to avoid having deeply personal information in it if I’d ever be asked for a password. Because I don’t want any of my files to be backed up on some government server, I also don’t take any pictures even when there are moments I wish I could.
How easy is it to create your own personal server and forward pictures from your phone over to it? I plan to delete the local images afterward to avoid having them in case a border guard demands my burner phone’s password. Are there any guides that are easy enough to work with using a raspberry pi and a flash drive?
If your server is running Linux you could run Termux on your phone and copy the files to the server via SCP. You could do it periodically with a script or you could run the command one time before you were going to travel across a suspect border.
Termux has the added advantage of being a generic app, without any specific purpose. There could be a situation where you don’t want to have a ‘Photo Downloader and Hider 9000’ app on your phone.
If you just want something akin to iCloud/Google Photos, Immich is a good project to get started with.