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Comment by ses1984 | Hacker News Reader

ses1984

"now"?

What is Google photos? Isn't half the purpose of Google photos to be food for machine learning?

It is, I have been using it because it's very convenient to find specific photos if you have a huge archive. You can type basically any object, name or name + object and you'll get the relevant photos.

I am thinking about stopping it because I'm uncomfortable with Google having all that data. I'm going to look into any local and/or open source solutions in this space.

I wanted to show a friend a picture of our cat sitting on top of our TV (which is hanging on the wall). I spent a few minutes scrolling through my photos unable to find it. Ended up searching for "TV cat" and it came up right away. Wish I had started with that.

I just don't trust myself enough to not fuck up and lose all my photos if I self hosted something that was equal. I run a small home lab and I never store anything on it I cannot afford to lose.

I do such searches on my iPhone all the time. Especially cat photos. According to the Photos app, my recent searches include "cowboys," "april 2019," "colorado," "trains," "canyons," and "cat."

The iPhone was able to complete all of those searches without sending my data to Apple. When companies like Google say they have to have a copy of your pictures, they are lying.

That's only useful if all of the photos that I want to search are already on my iPhone. I can't search from a different device, and I can't search the hundreds of GB of photos from years ago because they don't fit.

> When companies like Google say they have to have a copy of your pictures, they are lying.

Did Google actually say that? I think they just built a product with different trade-offs than Apple Photos.

If I need to search hundreds of GB of photos, I can with an iPhone, too.

The phone automatically offloads the full-resolution images to iCloud while retaining thumbnails and metadata. The photos on iCloud are encrypted so that even Apple can't see them.

Moving the goalposts doesn't change the fact that everything you want can be done on-device, with none of the privacy-destroying methods that Google has imposed on the world.

And you used to be able to find stuff on Lycos too, but the search quality between Lycos, Altavista, and Google were dramatically different.

Google Photos can tag individual pets, it does facial recognition of animals!

Blew my mind when I first saw they had added it.

You have to tag your pets (I think it'll prompt you at some point, or IIRC you can tap your pet's face) and name them, but after that it'll also create an auto-category (label? album? Whatever) for each pet.

Super cool stuff.

My favorite piece of this is how it tracks my kid across all of their ages. My kids look nothing like what they looked like as infants, and when they were infants, they looked very similar, but I can choose a kid and it shows me photos of them going back to their birth, and it doesn't confuse the kids at all.

I self host, but then back that up to Wasabi [1] every night using rclone [2].

1. https://wasabi.com/

2. https://rclone.org/

> I'm going to look into any local and/or open source solutions in this space.

Share if you find anything. The only other solutions I've found so far are:

Apple Photos - requires having Apple devices

Plex - meets neither the 'local' nor 'open source' requirement as it sends your photos to some other random cloud provider to scan

If you can find anything, or if anyone else does know, please do share!

I'm building that right now, and an looking for more beta testers. https://blog.photostructure.com/introducing-photostructure/

Your photos and videos remain on hardware that you own (or rent). It's designed to scale to millions of photos and videos on limited hardware (I run it for my family on a raspberry pi with a big external hard drive that sits next to my router). The browsing experience is fun, both on a 4k display and on my iPhone SE

The only cloud service I run is my licensing storefront, and delegate error reporting to Sentry, which you can opt out of.

Disclaimer: I'm the founder and developer.

This looks great. Do you support Live Photos? (JPG + MOV with the same name, with a still photo part and a motion video part)

Currently I import both the mp4 and jpg as separate assets, but I will absolutely fix the presentation to be autoplay-video-then-show-image, as it should be.

For those with a Synology, their Photos app has some of this search ability, but Google is much further ahead.

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