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Chengyu Wang
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Migrating My Image Host From a Self-Built Google Drive Setup to Chevereto

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Blog Self-Hosting NAS Cloudflare
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Chengyu
I’m Chengyu — a final-year Computer Science student at the University of Sydney. I write about the things I build and break, plus hiking, travel, gaming, and gadgets.
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I recently reworked how my blog stores images, moving away from a Google-Drive-based system I’d built myself and switching to Chevereto. Google Drive offered a generous 2TB of space, but in practice it came with enough friction that I started looking for something better.

Why I gave up on Google Drive
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The obvious upside of using Google Drive as an image store is the sheer amount of space, but the downsides were just as real:

  1. Constant re-authorization. Because of Google’s API limits, I had to re-authorize every 2–3 days — genuinely annoying.
  2. Long-term auth is a hassle. Getting a long-lived authorization means going through Google’s review process, which is slow and complicated, and it took a lot of the shine off the whole setup.

I originally picked Google Drive for the storage headroom, but over time these issues piled up into a real annoyance, and I started looking for something more flexible and under my own control.

Chevereto: a more self-sufficient setup
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After some research I settled on Chevereto as the new image gallery tool. It’s open source, capable, and — most importantly — fully under my own control. To make it work, I paired it with:

  1. Cloudflare Tunnel — using Cloudflare’s free tunnel service, I can reach my NAS securely without exposing my home network.
  2. NAS storage — my home NAS became the storage backend, giving me flexible, controllable capacity and better data security.

Between the two, I ended up with an efficient, stable personal image host. Chevereto itself was easy to install and configure, and it comes with a solid feature set — multi-user management, batch uploads, automatic image optimization, and more.

The Chevereto dashboard running on my own setup

What the new setup gets me
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Compared to the Google Drive approach, running Chevereto on my own NAS has some clear advantages:

  1. Full independence — no third-party service to depend on, and no API limits to work around.
  2. Safer and more controllable — Cloudflare Tunnel hides my real IP, and the data itself stays on storage I control rather than with an outside provider.
  3. Stable long-term — no more constant re-authorization; the whole system is just more reliable.
Images uploaded and served through the new pipeline

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