- Automatically upload our pictures from our smartphone
- Keep them private, viewable only to use, or family members.
- Nice gallery feature.
- Easy to export all data in one go.
I will pay cold hard cash for this. My wife will decapitate me if I lose our backup pictures of our kids when they were babies.
Apple Photos uploads things automatically every time, face tagging, place/moments tagging automatically, it rocks. This HN thread was amazing, I found Apple Photos!
Full disclosure: I work at Google (not on the Photos product though). All opinions expressed are purely mine, and not of my employer.
Without grahamburger's hack of creating an independent, shared account (which I wonder whether is strictly allowed by account usage terms), how can a family share all of their photos? I'm not talking about sharing an album. My wife and I would like all photos taken from either of our phones be automatically uploaded and shared between us. We've not found a way to do that using Google Photos without making everything public, which is unacceptable.
Api,services are being shut down and this time people don't even have 2 months to move. Picassa and Google Photos are 2 different products, if people stuck with Picassa there must have been a reason.
They have native iOS and Android apps as well as a web app. They also offer the option to use your own AWS S3 bucket[1] at which point you can use their service for free. And you'd still retain complete control of the photos because you have access to the S3 bucket.
You can also download your whole library as a zip file with or without metadata[2].
[0]: https://picturelife.com/home
[1]: https://support.picturelife.com/hc/en-us/articles/202605823-...
[2]: https://support.picturelife.com/hc/en-us/articles/202512346-...
The only main thing missing here is the ability to install the web application on my own hosting account. I'd love someone to have a business model where the base app is free and open source, but there exist paid mobile and desktop apps and third party extensions. Basically, a WordPress-esque ecosystem, but for photos.
Flickr would probably require some tuning, as it's built as a social, not private photo-keeping, tool. SmugMug, though, is targeting professional photographers, so high-res, galleries, exporting is all there.
Flickr pricing is kinda off-putting - $0 for 1TB, $499 for 2TB.
That is what I use. Their ios & android has automatically uploaded my camera photos for years.
I move some into specific folders to share with family via their photo album (gallery) link feature.
As its dropbox, it is all just files and synced to my laptops all the time as well.
The only issue is if you like their gallery feature. I do, some may not. They recently closed their Carousel alternative.
https://photos.dropbox.com/app/timeline https://carousel.dropbox.com
https://medium.com/@jmathai/understanding-my-need-for-an-aut...
The photostation app backups my cellphone photos to the NAS, I also have daily glacier backups and backup to my home desktop regularly.
The only caveat is that due to security, I restricted web access to the nas storage, so that the pictures are only backed up when the cellphones are connected to my house network.
The best way to preserve photos is to print them. Prints can last decades if not centuries with no need to actively maintain them other than throwing them in a shoebox.