I know nothing about iphones, but need to set up an automatic backup from an iphone to a windows SMB share.

Is this something that you can do easily with iOS or do I need an app to do it?

You could do it with Dropbox.

You can get Dropbox to automatically upload photos from the iPhone to the Cloud.

You just need Dropbox also on a Windows PC and put it’s sync folder on the SMB Drive.

What you backing up? Isn’t this what icloud is for?

If you use iCloud Photo Library you will certainly need some sort of shenanigans, either a script to sync iCloud drive to a local drive and share it, or double up on sync with Dropbox (as mentioned above, the Dropbox client will make it easier to dump the files into a folder locally).
I’m not sure you can directly access the raw files through iCloud Drive even though its the ‘same’ storage.

What you backing up? Isn’t this what icloud is for?

They charge a fortune for storage, you’d have to be seriously ITchallenged to use it for anything other than the free 5Gb you get. NB My iPhone has about 40Gb of photos on it…

Fair enough footflaps thought it was a sensible price. $25(AU) for 100gb here with other providers.

Still worth going back and asking what your actually backing up as specific apps for music and photo’s may be a much better way.

NB My iPhone has about 40Gb of photos on it…

Mine has about 250mb as they are zapped off to google photo’s everytime the phone see’s wifi, downloaded into 3 places automatically via google drive then accessible from anywhere.

You say backing up? The phone or just the photos?

I use iCloud, 50gb for 79p per month for peace of mind, backing up my phone every night. I don’t backup my photo’s as that would take me over the 50gb.

If it’s the whole phone you want backed up to the share, I don’t think its possible without iTunes.

If you must go SMB, please be aware of the risks. WanaCry use SMBv1 as a transport/propagation method, so having an unpatched server on the network that uses this protocol could be an issue if they get rid of the sinkhole or re-role the malware.

Of course, y’all applied the patches for MS17-010 though, right?

If DropBox or iCloud is not your thing, there are many other cloud storage providors. iCloud is just going to be easiest though.

Windows share, so got a Windows PC and by any chance got Office 365 subscription with that? If so you’ve got 1TB of OneDrive storage. Even if not, 365 home subscription isn’t that much and gets you full Office for 5 installs plus the 1TB, and there’s a cheaper personal subscription and still gets you 1TB storage.

Then just get the OneDrive app for iOS, which I believe does photo sync, same as the Google and Win Phone versions.

SMB, not sure what you’d get for iOS that syncs to SMB. Though if you had a Synology NAS you can get phone apps for it that will sync to shares on the NAS. But that’s another purchase.

As said, careful with SMB shares. Don’t expose them to the public Internet. Too many risks, even with all the latest patches.

They charge a fortune for storage, you’d have to be seriously ITchallenged to use it for anything other than the free 5Gb you get. NB My iPhone has about 40Gb of photos on it…

50gb for less than a tenner a year. 200Gb for less than £30. Hardly “a fortune”!

£2.99 a month for 200Gb from iCloud. I have 160Gb of photos .. seems reasonable as they are about the only part of my PC total loss would really hurt.

Also have around 2Gb of important docs (insurance etc) and iphone/ipad state backups.. if you are on Apple devices it makes sense.

Think it would also help if the OP clarified why they wanted an SMB share.. referring to it as SMB or CIFs shows a certain level of knowledge that makes me think they want to share internally, behind a NAT firewall rather than in the wild..

Yes, its on the LAN at home behind a NAT, not exposed to the wild.

We want to get the photos from the iphone onto the SMB share so that they’re available to all devices connected to the LAN, and it gives a handy backup (yes, I know its not really a backup as its not kept on a desert island somewhere in a cloud).

Ideally a solution that doesn’t involve the cloud inbetween would be good to avoid additional software on the iphone.

well the easiest way to share photos is iCloud photo sharing (i.e. not using your SMB share). Otherwise Dropbox will do it (as mentioned above) but it’s hardly an elegant solution by comparison!

What @footflaps says the iCloud storage about free amount is very expensive. iCloud sharing is easy and works for 1000 photos but its not a backup solution

If you have the Flickr app it will automatically upload all photots and you get 1TB free

In my opinion, whilst you could do this without a cloud service, it is likely to be a janky, overly nerdy solution, which ultimately means you spend so much time administering it, that it becomes useless.

so options.

1. google photos – download app to phone, download app to PC, point PC app to store copy on NAS. whenever your computer is on and connected to WiFi, it will update the files on the share. (free and easiest solution)

2. the same with Icloud – Download icloud for PC and set it download photos to the share. As above, whenever your PC is on and connected to the internet, it will download your photos and save them to the share.

If you are not prepared to pay for the service you have to manually delete all the photos off your phone after copying existing library to the share and ensure that you delete the photos off your device regularly This deletes them from the icloud storage, but not your local copy, keeping you within your 5gb limit. Downside – you cant view your photos from years ago on your phone, if you are a cheapskate.

3. Once a week plug your phone into your laptop and set it to backup your photos to the share. This completely removes any cloud paranoia you may have.

I am a bit of a tin foil freak and don’t like having all my information in google services (they have my calendar and email) so i keep my photos on icloud, but if i didn’t care about google tracking my every move i would use google photos as it is a really good service.

iCloud is easiest, it’s not actually expensive despite what others say. Ok it’s not for nothing but gor the convenience I think it’s cheap. 79p a month does me for everything on my phone. I think security is the bigger issue.

Dropbox automatically can sync your iPhone photos with the app, works well too.

Who would you trust to be in existence in 15 years, Apple or Google?

Not sure I’d be keeping anything with Apple personally!

Google have/had unlimited photo storage, but I think you have to allow them to mess with the photos. It won’t store the originals but would convert them (so the file size would be much smaller). And yeah, they’ll be grabbing all the location data off the files and making much use of that. Though Facebook does the same when you post files with embedded location data.

Just syncing to a share on the network will involve an app I’m sure. I don’t think you’d get iOS to do it out of the box given how restrictive Apple are.