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Comment by blfr | Hacker News Reader

Is there something like this but self-hosted? Data encrypted on the client with a good client for Android (and maybe Linux), simple sharing feature for selected items.

Free/Libre Google Photos, basically.

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It's not quite free/libre, but I was positively surprised by Synology Moments.

It's basically a software package on the Synology NAS which creates a locally hosted version of Google Photos (including sharing and gallery capability). It comes with Android/iOS apps that can automatically backups all photos directly to your NAS and thus stay in your own ownership.

There is a cost of entrance though - you need to buy the NAS and harddrives... but IMO there's nothing quite like owning your own data.

I absolutely love my Synology NAS. The photos function and the Video one especially. Being able to access all the videos on my NAS from any computer/phone/tablet in the house and have them transcode in real-time to suit the device, and/or cast them to our TVs. It’s great.

Synology has built in sharing over the public web, right? How have ya'll found that functionality to work? Can you just share files and folders with any email address, or does the person you're sharing with have to have a Synology account?

there's nothing quite like owning your own data

Sure, but I already have servers and terabytes of storage. Also, I don't want to keep a server/NAS at home. I want it sitting on a big, fat pipe in some DC with professionals maintaining it.

100% agree. But I'm using the "old" PhotoStation instead of Moments. It feels too much like Google Photos where all pictures are bundled, and I like to have "Albums" or folders that are separate. But i use it also for just regular camera photography, not just phone where it makes more sense to have a timeline. Hard to have a useful timeline when I take 1000 pictures in a weekend with my Fuji

Maybe something listed here?

https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#pho...

I've been following OwnPhotos' (sporadic) development for a while: https://github.com/hooram/ownphotos

Woah via 'project abandoned' issue there, where some contributors have been discussing forking and continuing (but nothing happening yet in nearly a year of that), I just came across https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism - seems great, further along, and more used (as measured by GitHub stars..).

https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism

Best google photos clone I've come across so far.

Yes this team is great. They also plan to offer their own hosting services.

I started using Photostructure[0] which is still in Beta and rough around the edges but its sole creator seem really dedicated and committed to it. No affiliation apart from using it and giving feedback.

EDIT: no E2EE or mobile support, it’s web based. It is self hosted with a privacy focus.

[0] https://photostructure.com/

Howdy! Have you had a chance to update to version 0.9 yet? Sync was reworked and mobile support was improved: https://photostructure.com/about/v-0-9/

If you ever find anything odd, confusing, or buggy, please tell me, I'll try to get it addressed asap.

I recently installed and started using this: https://github.com/LycheeOrg/Lychee It doesn't have a load of features, but I expect to be using this for my own pictures from now on. You can create albums and select which users have access to which albums.

I use a non-free self hosted app called PhotoStructure https://photostructure.com/. It is currently in beta and I hope to see it grow in features in the future, mainly sharing. It feels a lot like Google Photos or Apple Photos. What I like is it presents all of my photos (which I took with my mirrorless camera) in a neat presentation with a random sample––I’ve re-discovered so many memories this way.

OwnCloud / NextCloud? I haven't used either but would be interested to hear from any folks who have.

Nextcloud works well. The web-based gallery UI isn't great, and the phone UI isn't great, but if you're looking for a way to self-host everything, share with family, etc. it's a good solution. You can always run a better self-hosted gallery on the web side, and mount the Nextcloud storage right into it. Nextcloud's Android client, while minimalist, has some surprising and useful features. It integrates well with the rest of Android, so you can browse and select photos from Nextcloud to e.g. upload to Facebook, and most-surprisingly, you can have your phone automatically upload photos and videos to Nextcloud when you take them, so that you don't have to do anything manually. Overall, Nextcloud is surprisingly good for photos.

I use Nextcloud, run it on a dedicated server at home running FreeBSD.

My wife and I use it exclusively to auto-backup our mobile photos.

With that in mind, I'd say that yes it works, but is it the right tool? Not really.

First, we don't use the web stuff at all, the app isn't great when it comes to choosing what, how and to which folders things should be synced. It is however useful that I can share my auto-upload folder with my wife's account so she can print the photos I take of our baby daughter, she's almost exclusively the subject of our mobile photographs these days.

Finally, you're almost guaranteed to break it every few updates. I've spent several evening over the past couple of years recovering from updates. Much of this is likely down to my lack of knowledge of FreeBSD, but honestly, it shouldn't be breaking in the first place.

I began writing something in something in Golang, that would use microservices to read out exit data, generate thumbnails and provide APIs to give family members custom photo frames we could push photos to. Unfortunately I haven't had the motivation to continue working on it.

I'll keep looking for something else with good Android apps, preferably written in Golang so it's lean and easy to update that'll do the backup/sharing.

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