Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

362 pointsLifeIsBio306 comments

With Google ending its free photo storage policy in a few days[0], I'm considering switching to another service. I've poked around a few recommendation sites[1], but am curious to know if anyone has suggestions for new and/or under-the-radar services they would recommend?

[0] https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-changes/

[1] https://www.techradar.com/how-to/best-google-photos-alternat...

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Hey, over the last year we've been building ente[1], an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos.

We have shipped open-source[2] web and mobile apps that have preserved 180,000+ files. Apart from cross-device sync, you can share your albums end-to-end encrypted, and filter photos by location and time.

We recently had a "successful" launch on r/degoogle[3]. We wanted to Show HN after incorporating the feedback we received from there, but since OP asked, I thought I’ll drop a comment here.

If you’ve any questions, please ask.

[1]: https://ente.io

[2]: https://github.com/ente-io

[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/njatok/we_built_a...

180,000 photos seems tiny. I have about 20k photos just on my own, my wife probably has more. 180k is like 10-50 people. Not saying you can't handle it but 180k doesnt signal "I've got scaling all figured out" to me.

More than scale, it was trust and reliability that I wanted to show. Of these, I feel that scale is the simpler problem to solve.

Especially with a stateless service like a photo hosting service, this is very true.

Wish you all the best!

Everything has to start somewhere.

I’m at 93k myself…

I have 180,000 photos in Google Photos

What's your strategy to get enough users so that you become financially sustainable?

The current set of paid users are sufficient to break-even on the infrastructure costs.

As for personnel costs, a few more hundred paying users and we'll be set. Feedback from existing users have been positive, and we should be able to reach that point by end of the year.

It helps that we're living in one of the cheaper parts of the globe, and are not motivated by money. We're building this because an easy to use, privacy friendly alternative needs to exist.

> not motivated by money

Ummm, could you elaborate on this? It sounds great but it's at the same time so foreign to me...

I am not them but I know a lot of people who are not motivated by money. I guess they need and want enough money to happily live and work in good conditions, but not more, and they do not seek to become the next Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos.

Right. But you need money to pay for infrastructure and employees.

"not motivated by money" sounds very much like "we'll be shutting down in 2 years"

Hey, our infrastructure is already being paid for by existing users.

Our pricing plans are designed such that you cover your own storage + bandwidth costs, and then some more. We don’t have a "forever-free" plan, and don’t intend to have one.

And the compute requirements for a product like this are low (since most of the computation happens on the client).

So currently what we need money for is employees (engineers) and not infrastructure.

"Not motivated by money" in this context simply means not being profit focused, so breaking even and/or revenue enough to hire some more engineers is probably the monetary goal

To me, that’s a red flag for a service I don’t want to see disappear in a few years.

Why? Not motivated by money still means they can generate income and even grow. They might not personally become rich, and they are ok with that. What's the problem?

“Not motivated by money” doesn’t mean they’re doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, it just means they’re optimizing for other things, and just see cash flow as a way to keep the lights on and their employees paid.

Are there any plans to add search and automatic image tagging ?

Our web app[1] lets you search by time ("last week", "April 14", ...) and location ("New York").

Tagging faces and objects is on our roadmap, we will ship it.

[1]: https://web.ente.io

I can't tell if this is self hosted or not. All I see is a centralized option. If not self hostable, a user still can't guarantee that this doesn't just end up being as bad as google photos. There are plenty of companies like this that provide an alternative to the mainstream then sell out. Really, the only person you can trust is yourself at the end of the day.

Down in the reddit comments it says it is not self-hosted because of limited "engineering bandwidth".

That seems counterintuitive.

As long as the server is closed source, this remains in the 'nice but do not touch' territory.

AKA we want to lock you in to our PAAS

It looks like they only open sourced the clients, not the backend.

Also the phrase "ente has an open architecture and source code that has been peer reviewed" that can be found on their website follows a dark pattern: hey, look we are open but not really.

Hey, I'm sorry that it came across that way. Thanks for pointing it out, I now see the lack of clarity. I've updated the copy to better reflect the situation.

Great, thanks for the fast reaction!

Hey, maintaining and providing support for a server that is de-coupled from underlying external integrations (storage, payment, secrets, email, ...) is what requires bandwidth.

Also, self-hosted consumer products are hard to sustain profitably. Avenues for monetization are low.

Given that our long term target audience is people like my parents, we did not see enough value in investing in a self-hosted variant, and wanted to reduce the number of distractions.

This is not to say that we are against the idea of a self-hosted variant, just that it is not a priority for us right now.

The self-hosted audience is also very small. I think you made the right choice.

For photos I’d agree as most customers are end users. Don’t underestimate this for other products though. Self hosting is a huge feature for selling into large corporations with data security policies.

Why would corporations want to use google photos alternative tho? They're probably are using Gsuite or Office 365 already, both of which have photo storage options. If they're okay with their emails there, I dont think photos is an issue. So yes they made the right choice, by ignore the self hosting crowd, which is a very small crowd.

Hey, ente is currently not directed at an audience that has the knowledge and energy to set up and maintain a reliable storage infrastructure.

We had started off as a self-hosted project, but ran into difficulties monetizing that model. We wanted to pay our rents, and continue working on this, and an E2EE SaaS was a way forward.

We are not averse to supporting a self-hosted version in the future. But that commitment requires engineering and support bandwidth, which we don’t have right now.

You've made the right choice not to opensource and or support self-hosting options from day one.

In my opinion open source software benefits greatly from first being closed sourced and commercially backed with an OSS release coming in the future after stability has been established.

As a user of ente, I can say I’m pretty happy. It doesn’t have all the features that Google has but they’ve made a promising start. If the search feature becomes comparable, I’d move off Google photos permanently.

Can the search feature of ente become comparable to Google Photos? AFAIK, ente does E2E encryption, which means that unless they index the EXIF data on each single device, and also run the image recognition algorithms on device, the search is never going to be comparable to Google Photos.

I can't live without the face / object detection. It's been so useful

If they're extracting a the fingerprints what privacy are you expecting? A pinky promise that says, we won't read your data? That would long as long is its bought by Facebook/google. Remember pinky promises made by gazillion startups?

Does this service encourages user outside EU?

What about latency concerns for people who are not based in EU? I saw on that website that the servers are hosted in EU, and say I need to use it in Asia will have service have usable latency?

Hey, some of our users (and us) are based out of Asia, and have not observed latency to be an issue. We are currently tunneling our data over Cloudflare, and that helps quite a bit.

If you find observable latency within the service, please write to vishnu[at]ente.io. I will see what we can do.

I got and email about this few weeks back (I must have signed up to the list at some point) but I was put off by two things.

> We've already preserved 100,000+ files, and are quite reliable at this point.

"quite reliable" doesn't cut it for a paid service for me, even a new one.

My second issue, and I might be wrong about this, is that there's no way to share photos with someone who isn't a (paying) ente user.

> "quite reliable"

As an engineer, I shy away from using superlatives. But sorry, I now understand that this could have been phrased better. Thank you for pointing it out.

> no way to share photos

Correction, the receiver can be on the free plan.

I am guessing he is expecting to share pics with users who did not sign up. It maybe a one time thing.

But I think you need user logged in because of encryption.

That’s right.

We could generate public URLs that contain the decryption key of the album within the URL fragment. But as an encrypted storage provider, we would like to ship this only after we're reasonably confident that there are checks in place to prevent abuse.

Yes, this is what I meant and the solution you describe is what I'd be looking for. So +1 from me!

ente looks interesting to me, but I would like to have the feature to share an album with anyone who has the link. I guess that is not so easy to do though as it would require creating a decrypted copy of the photos in the album that you wish to share which would take extra time and space.

The client that is sharing the album could append the decryption key of that album to the URL fragment, such that it never reaches the server.

For example: albums.ente.io/{albumID}/!#{decryptionKey}

Now on the receivers side, the client can use this `decryptionKey` to decrypt and render the photos.

I think this is a mismatch between UK English where "quite" means "extremely" and US English where "quite" means "mostly".

I'm British and to me "quite" here means "mostly" i.e. not entirely. Could well be a misunderstanding but it should be made clearer as this data is priceless.

Doesn't "quite good" mean "great"? That was my impression, at least.

This is classic British understatement. It doesn't literally mean 'great', but depending on how it's said it can be interpreted as such.

Not really, but it depends on context. The nuance is often difficult to detect when written. When spoken, a phrase like "quite extraordinary" or "quite brilliant" would usually be a superlative, as you suggest, but it would usually be indicated by emphasis on the "quite". And the adjective itself already has to be quite strong, so "quite good" will never really mean "great".

Another Brit. It's all in the context. "Quite" can easily be a strong superlative but it relies on shared understanding between the parties so I wouldn't depend on that interpretation.

It's fine in a spoken context as tone can add sufficient extra meaning. If you can guarantee the listener is expecting an informal register then it probably also comes across as a superlative. "I met him and he's quite unpleasant" would usually imply he was a total c*nt.

>as this data is priceless

Personally, I'd never trust the only copy of something important to a service provider--especially one that isn't a "big name." (Though even in the case of big names there can be issues with account access, etc.)

ADDED: Curious why people find this a controversial statement. I understand if you have AWS set up with various redundancies but even a service like Backblaze I consider a belt and suspenders-type backup. This is in no way a commentary on the OP but simply an acknowledgement that stuff happens.

You're right about two being one and one being none.

Our current setup includes primary backups to BackBlaze[1], and eventually consistent replications to Scaleway's cold storage[2].

We would like to offer an extra replica as an addon in the future.

[1]: https://www.backblaze.com

[2]: https://www.scaleway.com/en/c14-cold-storage

Makes sense. You can feel vulnerable in a big hurry if your primary fails or if it turns out that one of your backups wasn't being properly backed up to.

I know a lot of people these days are fine with their stuff mostly just being stored in "the cloud" someplace. But for things like photos, I really want a couple copies under my control to the degree possible.

I think most Brits (I am a Brit) would write "very" when they mean "extremely" rather than "quite". In spoken English there is a lot of nuance, but if you said a meal was "quite good" it would often have a connotation of "better than just okay" rather than "excellent". Saying a meal was "really good" would be closer to "excellent".

This looks pretty neat, I wonder how I've been missing it so far.

Do you have an public API? I'd love to have a tiny sync client to fetch photos and store them on my laptop.

The API is public, but the documentation needs work.

If your current use case is only to sync your uploaded files to a local folder, we have an Electron app that does just that: https://github.com/ente-io/bhari-frame/releases/tag/v1.0.3

Thanks! Any reference to the API, even if it's just incomplete docs?

An electron app seems like a huge overkill for something so simple (have you considered just a simple cli instead?).

The API doc is incomplete and outdated, and I'm embarrassed to share it in its current state. I will update this thread once it is presentable.

The Electron app is indeed an over kill (hence the repo-name "bhari", meaning overweight). But it made it easy for us to reuse stable code that performed authentication, decryption, data-sync, etc. Also, we did not want to commit to the overhead of maintaining another stack (say a CLI or a native app) at a point where the value it would provide to a customer was unclear.

Product looks simple and promising as a good alternative to google photos.

Feedback: You can improve your website looks.

Goodluck

Thank you!

Regarding the website, I would be grateful if you could point out the worst part(s). I would love to improve.

What is the design target for this service? Is it the technophile who is trying to degoogle, is it some other specific design target or perhaps more general audience?

If it’s degooglers then perhaps convincing us it has everything Google Photos had is job number 1. If it’s missing feature X then you’ve got a reason to say no, if it’s at parity then it comes down to whether we trust YOU and is the deal good enough.

You’ve already convinced us you’re not Google so there is some things implied but you need to lean into it. Privacy, not having you information used for ad targeting, never sharing our photos or information derived with third parties - those are all thing to highlight (be the anti-Google).

I think you need some other killer feature or appeal that makes you different than iCloud here since Apple are already the anti-Google. I think you can also get 2TB of iCloud Photo storage for $10 a month so you gotta hit that if you want to charge $15 for 500GB.

Kudos to the name! The meaning ("ente" = "mine" in Malayalam) meshes deeply with what the service is, and it is short and easy for everyone to pronounce.

Glad you like it. :)

It means duck in German.

Why is every string in all lowercase? It reminds me of tumblr..

We thought it looked playful, friendly that way, and less like a boring archival-solution. We liked that persona.

> We have shipped open-source[2] web and mobile apps that have preserved 180,000+ files.

Is that the total number of files on your platform? Not to be rude, but is this supposed to be impressive or reassuring? My photo collection is approaching half that number, and I'm just one person, so now I'm feeling completely underwhelmed by the claim.

I felt that having replicated 200k files without failures is an indicator of reliability (not scale).

But you're right, the number is minuscule compared to where we are hoping to be. We're just getting started and I'm hopeful that we will 10x this number in the next few months.

If you're willing to self-host, Photoprism[0] is pretty nice and easy to get up and running.

It has the flavor of Google Photos, but it's definitely a step down in UX. One of the features I really love about Google Photos is the ability to jump quickly through time. Like if I'm looking for a photo I took around June 2018, I can get to it in <5 seconds.

I didn't realize what a magical feature it is until I tried looking for it with alternatives and found that they all have a lot of scrolling, pausing to load new photos, more scrolling.

But I'm impressed with what Photoprism has achieved as a small, donation-funded OSS project, so I'm hoping to see them grow.

[0] https://photoprism.app

>Like if I'm looking for a photo I took around June 2018, I can get to it in <5 seconds.

Not only that, you can search for a photo of a light bulb you know you took, but don't know when, but simply typing "light bulb".

PhotoPrism does this too.

Do you know if they have a portable option so i can keep it on my external drive that i have all my media on?

Yes, I have it installed locally. Haven't played around with it much though, features like grouping by face were not present the last time I checked. Honestly, Google Photos is just too convenient. Photoprism is a good backup option though.

To be honest, $2/month isn't that unreasonable from a useful service. I would definitely class Google Photos as useful, especially its ability to search for pictures.

I personally use iCloud, and back everything to a Synology.

It is not, however for some of us, there was an implicit “I let you datamine my images, you host them” relationship. Having to pay google tips the scales, so why not spend your $2 on a more privacy oriented service?

Because most competitors are much more than $2/mo.

I love being able to search random things like "Honda" or "waffles" to find pictures from years ago in a few seconds. I use it often now that I can do it

Because the people willing to pay Google for their service don't mind the use of their pictures to better their services elsewhere. Google didn't get to be where it was without us , and the fight for privacy isn't worth it for some (most) people. Alternatives usually involve self hosting, trusting a privacy focused service , or not doing it at all. It's tiring. I respect the effort , but In a lot of ways it feels like going backwards.

The fight for privacy is absolutely worth it. Those people have no idea about what they are getting into, they don't know anything. That is not something to base upon.

To assume that they don’t know “what they are getting into” is a bit patriarchal.

You think a random person who would never look or care about tech would understand the privacy issues? Absolutely not. All they'd know is what the companies say and advertise.

I don't agree, especially due to massive media coverage around these issues even my mom who knows nothing about tech is very hesitant to sign up with new services and existing ones changing policies and what not. Not everyone understands the privacy issues deeply, but they are at least aware and in many cases more careful than say 5 years ago.

That is exactly how google wanted it to be. Thy lied made everyone attached to the technology and now milking off it. Moreover I would not like google to invade my privacy if I am paying for it. I am paying and also my privacy is being breached. that doesn't seem fair

What kind of datamining? I suppose we have no way of actually knowing if it's true, but Google does say they don't use Photos data for ads:

As always, we don’t sell your information to anyone, and we don’t use information in apps where you primarily store personal content—such as Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Photos—for advertising purposes, period.

https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/keeping-priva...

> As always, we don’t sell your information to anyone, and we don’t use information in apps where you primarily store personal content—such as Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Photos—for advertising purposes, period.

As always with privacy policies, the information is in what is NOT said.

1. They don't sell to anyone. But what giving away for free?

2. They don't use personal content for advertising purposes. But what about other purposes than advertising? For example applying face or location recognition in photos to establish a profile that is used in a fraud detection service in Google Pay?

1 seems unlikely to me - why would Google do that? It would always be in exchange for something, which is pretty much selling.

2 seems more plausible.

1) I trust them when they say they don't sell it, technically.

However they probably do sell information/meta data they themselves have mined from my data, which they probably claim is harmless and de-personalized.

FB effectively gave data away to app developers (e.g. Cambridge analytica).

They got something in return - as they do with all their partners - but this is not generally considered a sale, and often not even a trade.

Users gave data away to app developers, not Facebook.

Google, in general, does not sell or give away data. What they do is charge advertisers to target ads to users based on that data.

The distinction is that 3rd parties only have access to Google UIs or APIs based around ad targeting selectors. There is no API for 3rd parties to just download raw user data from Google.

This is in contrast to Facebook, which used to allow “apps” on their platform to suck down raw user profile data in large quantities.

It seems very likely that Google is using their user data for non-ad purposes, for example using Google Photos data to train ML image recognition engines, or using Gmail data to train conversational AI systems.

At $2 per month they are probably still subsidizing you with datamining.

I'm fine my photos are managed by Google, so I signed up 100GB plan of Google One. Google Opinion Rewards provides me enough money to fulfill the annual fee.

How are you getting so many surveys? I can't seem to get more than one every few months!

I'm in Japan. I sometimes (about 30%) receive survey about payment method after I visit random store in a day. It uses my location history. Rewards are about 10-50JPY (about 9-45c) each.

What’s your setup for that? How do you sync (incoming) photos to an arbitrary place outside of the Photos library?

I'm not the GP but what I do is all my camera devices will sync to a cloud drive, and my NAS then syncs the cloud drive. Google Photos seems to be able to see them. That way I always have two copies of the image, a cloud version and a local.

The main failure mode I'm concerned about is if Google decides I'm no longer worthy of an account. In that case I'll still have my pics and I'll put in the effort to set up some other service.

How do you do this with iPhoto?

With an iPhone it doesn't seem that there is a way to sync with a folder anymore.

I'm unsure how to do it with iPhoto. My guess is it syncs up to Apple cloud, from which the NAS should be able to sync? At least once it's off the phone you don't have the sandbox, which is a bit stronger on Apple devices, IIRC.

My cameras are all Androids, so I use FolderSync to put things in the cloud. It being Android there's still a filesystem that it can scan. I use an app on my QNAP to bring them back home.

Synology has an iPhone app called DS Photo you can use to download pics directly to your NAS.

Different tool, but this forum post lists some options: https://forum.photostructure.com/t/automatic-phone-uploads/2...

Some of the tools recommended are:

https://syncthing.net/

https://www.resilio.com/

https://www.photosync-app.com/home.html

I've been using icloud-photos-downloader[0] for a while now, running as a Scheduled Task on my Synology. It supports 2FA as well, I just have to re-auth every 3-4 months.

[0] : https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...

You're certainly welcome to try PhotoStructure! It's got very robust de-duplication, supports portable libraries (so you can automatically sweep your photos scattered across many drives and computers into a single timestamped folder structure), and a novel UI showing a random sampled view of your library.

There's also an active forum for both support and to discuss what and how new features are built out.

https://photostructure.com/

Disclaimer: I'm the (only) author.

Thank you for building this. I was thinking of building my own but I think I'll try this out!

Oh. Deduplication across all drives! Consider me interested. Will try this out later.

I had boxes and boxes of old drives that I wanted to get organized which drove that feature: https://photostructure.com/about/introducing-photostructure/...

It's also why I implemented bitrot detection and metadata inference. A beta tester just called the date parsing heuristics "freaking awesome and so close to black magic…" :)

https://forum.photostructure.com/t/combining-images/524/7

(And if you prefer the command line, know you can do tons of things via the CLI: https://photostructure.com/server/tools/ )

How do you compute the duplicates? Does it detect rotated dupes, and resolution differences?

I tried a few things with ImageMagick, but ran into problems. I'll have to try your app!

Details are here: https://photostructure.com/faq/what-do-you-mean-by-dedupe/

Hey, PhotoStructure looks amazing. I'm intrigued. How and when does bitrot detection work? I couldn't find it on your site. I spend a decent amount of time making PAR2 volumes so I can detect failures as I've not come up with a better idea.

The bitrot detection is via libjpeg, libraw, and ffmpeg (to handle both photo and video validation): they can be run in verbose modes that can report decoding errors which are due to file truncation or outright corruption.

Wow - this sounds amazing. How does one set it up; does it automatically occur?

Yeah, it's part of automatic organization:

https://photostructure.com/getting-started/automatic-library...

FYI I just went to look for videos on YT showing off PhotoStructure and was amazed to see exactly 0 hits for "photostructure"[1]. Seems like a big opportunity waiting.

- [1] <https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22photostructu...>

Oof, yeah, I've got to sit down and record some screencasts. Thanks for the reminder.

I have an unRaid server and I found your app to be the easiest to use, but I had to switch to photo prism because you don’t have an easy way to tell the difference between photos and videos.

I know you previously responded that people should upvote that feature, but the inability to distinguish video from photo just seems like a must have fix over other potentially over engineered stuff that others are asking for.

(I just had a family member ask for this feature today in our family's PhotoStructure library: I'll get it into the next beta build which I hope to release in a day or two)

I implemented this after dinner tonight: https://forum.photostructure.com/t/show-video-icon-and-or-vi...

I really didn't have much luck with the de-duplication. I tried photostructure for about 3 weeks and since stopped. I was trying to pull photos from multiple different drives/folders into one central organised place. A few issues:

  - The de-duplication didn't seem to work, it at least was defeated by my messy files. I spent many hours manually going through the results and finding many dupes. Then I lost interest in doing that and gave up.

Edit: I've just realised, was this (by design) simply copying each photo into the merged tree but then if I browse using the photostructure app it will hide the dupes? Can I prevent it making a copy? I want to use other file/photo browsers also.

  - can't use datestamp info in the filename?

  - very, very slow to sync from my external USB 3 drive. I'd be happy with that if the de-duplication worked. Also the status about what it's doing seems sporadic and half the time appears to be doing nothing at all. Maybe my laptop is too slow? 
 
  - no map view

I did like the feed of random photos. I saw loads of great old snaps I'd forgotten about. Somewhat bizarrely, when I wanted to share them quickly with others I ended up taking a photo of the photo(s) with my smartphone and sharing that via WhatsApp. That's more my failing but it did seem a bit silly that I resorted to doing that.

> if I browse using the PhotoStructure app it will guide the dupes

Yes: out of an abundance of caution, the unique (by SHA) variations of each asset are copied into your library. There are heuristics that pick which is the "best," and although those heuristics seem to be robust for most beta users, I didn't want to be the source of want data loss.

> datestamp info in the filename?

The metadata in the file is trusted more than any date extracted either from the filename or the directory hierarchy. Details are here: https://photostructure.com/faq/captured-at/

If you use the info tool, it'll tell you how it's extracting the date from any given file: https://photostructure.com/server/tools/#file-information

> slow to sync

PhotoStructure scales imports to accommodate current hardware, in Ann effort to keep the system responsive. Parallelism is limited by available RAM and CPU count. If you think it was being too conservative, please send me a screen shot of your about page (it includes both system metrics and what is thinking for scheduling limits), and if you want, debug logs, and we can look into what's going on. https://photostructure.com/faq/error-reports/#how-to-manuall...

> no map view

This is a popular feature request that I'm looking forward to building: https://forum.photostructure.com/t/support-reverse-geocoding...

The metadata for some of my filew is total junk. If I used another tool to strip that bad metadata would it then use the datestamps in the filename? I think this was defeating the de-duplication also. In an ideal world I'd be able to configure everything from a particular source folder to use filename datestamps.

Yes: you can use `exiftool -all: $file` to strip all metadata, but please have backups before you do anything: ExifTool is both powerful and fast.

WARNING! Be aware that this is an Electron app. I tried it, and using the interface was like swimming in glue. I presumed this meant "Electron app" and a quick check confirmed it.

WARNING! Some users don't know that there are two other editions of PhotoStructure (docker and "bare metal" node) that run on macOS, Windows and Linux, all of which don't include Electron.

https://photostructure.com/server/photostructure-for-servers...

Nextcloud! I can't praise and recommend them enough! https://nextcloud.com/

You can self-host it, it's license is ASGI, so it's never going away, and it has an app for photos: https://github.com/nextcloud/photos

and another one where you can put all your photos on a map: https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/maps

Nextcloud also has a mobile app, with an feature for automatic upload of your pictures and quite a few settings (which folder to upload, etc.)

https://www.smugmug.com/ and https://www.flickr.com/ (Same parent company now).

Chris MacAskill founded it with his son. Pretty solid company, seems like.

https://mixergy.com/interviews/smugmug-chris-macaskill-inter...

Yeah. I don't use the community aspect of flickr much these days but seems a pretty solid place to upload photos and share them.

I would never use or recommend Flickr. They lied to me. As premium user (for many yars) the promise to me was that photos uploaded will be kept free forever as long as the service exists. Even if I stop paying. Then they went back on that. They may have a very good reasons, but the trust was broken.

They were owned by Yahoo for a while. Has the management changed since the one that broke your trust?

Why would anyone need to care who sits in the management? The trust was broken by a company.

A company is run by people. It's not like the logo decided to screw users over.

Since the new management never offered to restore my trust by going back on the original promise, they are complicit.

Flickr hasn't been under the same ownership twice over now.

I've been a paying customer of SmugMug for years and highly recommend them. I use it as a photography portfolio though, not as a Google Photos replacement (although it certainly can be used that was as well).

I use a Synology[0] NAS and use their Photos software with an additional backup to both rsync.net and BackBlaze, in addition to using Google Photos — which I'll happily pay for. (humor my redundancy: I'm extra paranoid about losing memories of my mother.)

[0] https://www.synology.com

Why backblaze? /r/datahoarder also recommends them, but I couldn't find a reason.

They are very reliable and have a very reasonable price which is hard to find these days.

Plus, their consumer product is extremely easy to set up so I can recommend it to folks who aren’t computer experts.

They are cheap and they recently added an S3-like API, so lots of apps that let you point at an S3-bucket-like URL just work.

Extremely reliable and one of the most "no muss, no fuss." backups. I had a drive fail and was able to recover all of my files by having them ship me a drive with my data on it and I returned the drive for basically no expense of my own (I have several 4-5TB drives and had an old 2TB drive fail. All for $5/mo to know that I don't have to worry about backup of cold-storage files for as long as they're in business.

I second this recommendation. I've done the whole DIY NAS thing a number of times but the Synology solution is just far more convenient and usually just works. Additionally, the there are so many other benefits to running a NAS, like the opportunity to plug in a set of IP cameras for security...

Also, the OP doesn't need to get rid of Google Photos. They can keep Google Photos as a off-site back-up.

Also there the Moments app by Synology that automatically backs up your photos to your NAS.

I third this recommendation.

I use the pointy clicky AWS Glacier backups app in case everything goes sideways.

I’ll add a shoutout to the CloudSync app on Synology, which let’s you connect to most of the major cloud storage providers and sync up, down or bidirectionally. I use it back up (sync changes down only) my Dropbox, Google Drive, GCS and B2 folders. It’s especially handy for quick access to the > 1tb assets I have in Dropbox that I don’t have space to sync to my space limited computer HDs. Plus with Recycle Bin enabled on Synology shared folders you get ad hoc restoration of deleted files dating back as long as you want.

Not even remotely an alternative in terms of usability/reliability, but I can describe my DIY setup.

I have a DIY NAS, based on a Raspberry Pi and an external hard disk enclosure, running in my kitchen. The disks are encrypted with LUKS. A combination of Syncthing and a cron job ensure that photos from my phone are constantly synced to the NAS without any input from me, and old photos are removed from my phone. A nice bonus is that if someone were to search my phone, they would not find many photos on it. I also never run out of space for photos/videos on my phone.

To view photos I use Shotwell. It does a decent if not perfect job of tagging, basic editing etc.

For encrypted, deduplicated offsite backups I use rsync.net and Borg, again together with a cron job.

All this crap is configured with Ansible in an effort to make it a little less fragile and more reproducible. It has been running without maintenance for a year or so but if you take this path, expect to spend many, many hours tearing your hair out over SAMBA Unix permissions and all sorts of other delights...

I have a similar setup, but with the Shotwell part replaced by Lychee. It's a self-hostable photo browsing web app. I can share photos with family members that way, like how I might share a google photo album to them.

Second for Lychee. If self-hosting, I would also recommend Piwigo. It has a nice complementary phone app.

I'm interested in your rassberry pi nas. Can it be done with a pi0? I've got one laying around and would love to put it to good use. I'm familiar with syncthing so it doesn't sound too much trouble for me right now.

not OP, but I tried to setup a NAS with my older B+, and it was really unreliable. The disk went to sleep every few minutes even when there was a file being read/written.

Dang. My journey for a practical use of my pi 0 continues...

Fwiw, I don't remember having drive problems when I used a pi zero as a small NAS. I do remember configuring the drives to never idle and spin down, though. I think I used hdparm and I definitely had a power supply that could support the drives.

I would expect that a pi0 could do it - depends on what sort of performance you want. An of course for a NAS you are better off with an Ethernet port - I would recommend a full-size SBC for this reason. But no fundamental reason why a pi0 can't do it. Here's a nice example: https://hackaday.io/project/8688-raspberry-pi-zero-altoid-na...

I'm doing pretty much the same thing with an rpi/syncthing. It's simple enough and "just works", while maintaining full ownership of my photos/videos. I looked into Shotwell and it seems pretty nice. I haven't really used anything to organize my Photos so far. One might say it's well worth a shot (sorry.)

I have always made a separate user with no login for network shares, be it syncthing or samba and never ran into permission problems. The samba config is pretty friendly with permission options. If anyone has ran into problems I might be able to help.

You can take a look at this repo [1]

Self-hosted

- Photoprism [2] - Feature rich server-based application for browsing, organizing and sharing your personal photo collection. The most similar to Google Photos.

- Photoview [3] - Photo gallery for self-hosted personal servers with Facial Recognition.

- Photostructure [4] - Self-hosted photo library that makes browsing and sharing a lifetime of memories delightful.

- LibrePhotos [5] - Active OwnPhotos [6] fork. Self hosted alternative to Google Photos.

- Nextcloud [7] - The open source self-hosted productivity platform that keeps you in control. It has a Photos plugin to help you organize and visualize your photos.

Third-party

- Stingle Photos [8] - Open source solution that provides strong security, privacy and encryption to backup your photos.

- Crypt.ee [9] - A private and encrypted place for all your photos, documents, notes and more.

- Ente [10] - Encrypted backups for your photos, videos and memories.

Local

- DigiKam [11] - Awesome Professional Photo Management with the Power of Open Source.

[1] https://github.com/pluja/awesome-privacy#photo-storage

[2] https://photoprism.app/

[3] https://photoview.github.io/

[4] https://photostructure.com/

[5] https://github.com/LibrePhotos/librephotos

[6] https://github.com/hooram/ownphotos

[7] https://nextcloud.com/

[8] https://stingle.org/

[9] https://crypt.ee/

[10] https://ente.io/

[11] https://www.digikam.org/

Picasa?

Google retired Picasa. From the site[0]:

  Moving on from Picasa
  We’ve decided to retire Picasa in order to focus on a 
  single photo service in Google Photos – a new, smarter 
  photo app that works seamlessly across mobile and the web.

[0] https://picasa.google.com/

linuxserver.io made an rdesktop-web based docker image of DigiKam[0], so I guess it could be "upgraded" to self-hosted. I'd be tempted by the potential of setting up various digikams as a service for my various users (the member of my family), where each instance could share some but not all photo folders with others.

[0] https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-digikam

Nextcloud is great, but not for photo galleries. The thumbnail generation is very unoptimised and it cannot handle folders with more than a small number of photos.

crypt.ee refuses to have a mobile app or allow third parties to do so, which is a hard dealbreaker if you use your phone to take photos.

It seems that the expect people to manually pick photos to upload one by one via their website and also figure out which ones you've already uploaded and not pick those again.

Basically the really hard part of syncing photos needs to be done manually.

Why are you looking for something free? Haven't you all learned by now that you are the product if it is free.

If you need a service pay for it monthly. If you need disks for storage pay for it once.

> Haven't you all learned by now that you are the product if it is free.

So when I'm running the Linux kernel, or compiling with gcc, or editing with vim, I'm the product? Could you explain to me how exactly?

Sorry but that sentence is completely stupid.

It's valid when speaking about a service. None of those are.

Services have operating costs, if you are not paying it means someone else is and your data and attention is very likely part of the package.

> Services have operating costs

So does ordinary, non-service software (like mentioned, Linux, gcc or vim). Hosting of their websites, mailing lists, CI, time of developers... they all cost very real money. And yet, somehow these programs don't track you and sell your data.

I don't mind paid services, but I don't think they should get a free pass for being unethical just because they run on someone else computer, under a different label.

Software development has costs which can[1] be distributed across their users: Linux costs a lot less per user to run if there's 10_000_000 installs versus 10 installs. And the value of the product to, say a specific 1000 users might be such that they're willing to pay its entire costs and tolerate the consequences of the GPL.

Services are different, in that each individual user will tend to place an additional load on the systems. It is much more obvious if there is 10 GB of data that can be attribute to virgoerns which must be managed and much more obvious that virgoerns should perhaps contribute to that.

> I don't mind paid services, but I don't think they should get a free pass for being unethical just because they run on someone else computer, under a different label.

This is an independent question from the above. Services, paid or free, should be obliged to act ethically. If they won't do that voluntarily, then they must be regulated. Part of this should be placing an explicit value on the data that they extract and including it in invoices; during some months, Google should perhaps pay you for your use of their services. Certainly if they're going to go around and cap your usage of their storage at 15 GB, then they should accept the reasonableness to cap their usage of your data.

[1]: "Can" doesn't necessarily "invariably must be able to"; individual circumstances and tradeoffs will have an effect on the extent to which the costs can approach constant values as users grow.

> Services are different, in that each individual user will tend to place an additional load on the systems

Sure. Then let me pay for those costs on my own. Give me the app and I'll configure my AWS keys.

The whole "you have to pay because it's a service" is an fallacious argument. The user should pay some costs, but the rest of them don't need to be "subscription based", not even paid.

A service is completely different...

You are storing gigabytes of files on a remote server, which costs a lot of money, and get services to modify or whatever your pictures remotely...

And, compared to Linux, it works out of the box... (ok, this was a troll).

Signal is a service and free but i'm not the product because it operate on donations. there is a lots of services living only on donations.

OneDrive. If you can get 5 other people to go in on a family plan with you, it's $17/year for 1TB storage. You can get OneDrive app for your phones and tablets to auto sync camera roll, etc. to OneDrive. As an added bonus, OneDrive is really well integrated with Windows 10 (if you are a windows user) so your pictures will just magically show up on your system as files you can drag and drop.

That's what I did. The 6 copies of office + 6x1tb cloud storage is hard to beat, especially if your employer is part of the HUP or you get it at a good discount otherwise.

I looked into other services but nobody seemed to compete, especially since I needed ~250gb minimum.

Yeh I'm gradually moving from Google to OneDrive for photos. I'm a office 365 subscriber anyway, but the Google photos interface is a little better and Google's sharing facilities are much better. OneDrive need to work on that. But if I'm going to pay someone, it's going to be Microsoft.

Not sure how switching from Google to Microsoft is a good idea.

OneDrive is terrible in windows to sync, is always trying to sync even if you are editing a file, so make you PC/Work slower. When you share and if add more files sometimes new files don't appear in the shared link. Shared Link URL are too big and your email will go in the URL.. I don't recommend at all. I'm just forced to use for work.

And if you know somebody from Microsoft, they can give you an employee discount. With the discount it's around 3 USD per person per year for 1TB storage each.

I bork OneDrive everytime I try migrating my Dropbox contents to OneDrive using rclone or old-fashioned copy.

Do your own tests, but Web and Windows filessystems get out of sync easily.

Pausing/unpausing the client does not work, resetting seems dangerous and I'd prefer not to do it.

I have been looking to get rid of Google Photos from my toolset for a different reason. I don't mind paying for valuable services. I have been on the 2TB Family plan of Google One for a while, as I thought I would use it as the backup for my Photos.

The second reason was that I could have a single photo collective for the family. Apple Photos do not make it easy to have an all-shared family photo pool.

Unfortunately, it is tough to manage the storage between drive and photos. There is no easy way to keep the ones you like and the ones you want to delete to save space. There is no easy way to escape Google Subscription hell once you get in.

And they have hidden the one thing I love about Google Photos -- ForYou. If you have kids, you will love this one. https://photos.google.com/foryou

I'm just an amateur and family photographer, but doing that for the past 20+ years has gotten me quite many photos. I'm on the highest additional storage possible along with the Apple One subscription, and I'm struggling to find a better storage solution for my photos. I have few ideas, but I'm on the lookout for choices.

For anyone else who doesn't know what Google Photos ForYou is:

> For a while now, the Google Photos app has included an “Assistant” tab. This is the place where all of Google’s automatically created creations are shown. Things like photo collages, animations, movies, albums, and more. The name of the tab has always felt like an implication that Google Assistant is creating these things, but it can be confusing if you’re not familiar with it. Google is changing the name of this tab to “For You.”

https://www.xda-developers.com/google-photos-renames-assista...

> Apple Photos do not make it easy to have an all-shared family photo pool.

FWIW, this is trivial these days. We have a “Family Album” that everyone can see, search, add to, etc.

Indeed, Photo Sharing has been there for quite a while and we use it to share with lot other family friends and relatives.

What our family needed is the ability to have a "common library" kinda where we don't have to specifically "Add to" to the common Album.

I know it is trivial but we tend to forget and that habit piles on. So, this idea just turns to "why don't they just eat cake instead?"

Shared albums contain (noticably) downsampled versions of the originals, see: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202786

I thought I could use shared albums to pool everyone's photos and use that pool to make backups, but that's not possible. Which isn't at all clear to people, in my experience.

For backing up photos, I've used two solutions:

1. PhotoSync[0] - it can your photos and videos to a local NAS. It has a ton of options for how to connect to a local NAS, plus it will connect to a variety of cloud services. It is very configurable. This used to be my primary way to transfer photos to my NAS, but I've since started using iCloud which does everything I need.

2. iCloud - Turn it on, sign up for the appropriate storage plan, it basically just works, and I can access my photos from all of my devices. Obviously only useful if you're in the Apple ecosystem.

For sharing photos, I like SmugMug[1].

[0] https://www.photosync-app.com/home.html

[1] https://www.smugmug.com/

Do you know if Photosync can retrieve full resolution photos from Google Photos? Every other tool out there can only get the lower-res version from the Google Photos API.

I think it does, but the method is paginated, so if you have several thousands of photos you have some scrolling to do.

PhotoSync is great. I use it all the time to sync my photos to my Synology NAS. Tons of options and filters to sync only what you need.

- Rename photos when syncing (timestamp based file names)

- Ignore screenshots, WhatsApp and other stuff

- Sync photos or videos only, or both.

- Convert HEIC to JPG etc.

Not affiliated, just a happy user for many years now.

> 2. iCloud - Turn it on, sign up for the appropriate storage plan, it basically just works, and I can access my photos from all of my devices. Obviously only useful if you're in the Apple ecosystem.

Note iCloud photos are not E2EE, and while data mining and tagging for your device occurs locally, Apple can and has demonstrated they will read your photos without your explicit permission. This happened to me when I raised a support case about a photos app bug on iOS, leading to them reviewing my icloud photos without asking first. I never got a response asking why they went in without permission.

Oh, I didn't know that. This is definitely an important consideration.

I'm in the market for this, albeit for different reasons. Perhaps coincidentally, right after Google announced ending their free storage their sync started acting up for me. Even though I'm a _paying_ customer. In that circumstance the usual Google lack of support becomes quite unacceptable.

For me the key feature is partner sharing. My wife and I take lots of baby photos. We see each other's photos as if we took them. This is the critical feature, and there is I think a large market for it. Even the slick ability to browse photos on the phone is nice but non-essential. Sync two people's photos reliably to a common S3 bucket, and even a janky web interface (+API) will suffice to get us to migrate. Convincing just one partner is easy.

This, and the easily being able to share the album with family is the most important feature right now for me.

I have shared albums with my wife that are generated automatically from photos of our kids based on facial recognition, and then we have a shared album with family where we add curated photos to - as the initial album is shared, we can do this with the other person's photos, not just ours. This works pretty much seamlessly for both photos and videos.

I'm pretty much in this boat. I looked up to Google Photos just for the Family Photos Sharing. I keep hoping Apple would come out with a better experience.

> I keep hoping Apple would come out with a better experience.

I recently migrated my 100K+ photo library from Google Photos to Apple Photos, and I can’t think of anything I miss.

I suspect Google Photos may be better for setting up a shared folder for a bunch of random people at an event, but I also haven’t tried that with Apple Photos.

Stingle photos might just be the tool you need. I've been using it for some time and it's good at what it does. https://stingle.org/

It is also SAAS, only the client is opensourced, no way to selfhost.

Maybe a Nextcloud instance would match your requirenments. It allows sharing to users or externals via an URL and it has a not too bad UI + Apps.

If you're that close with someone, the best thing to do is to use syncthing to synchronise your Photos folder. Every photo you take ends in that folder, is synchronized to your partner's Photos folder, and they will see it as if they took it. Add another syncthing to your computer and you can comfortably browse your photos there. Reorganize in albums from your computer if you want, and you will see the albums on the phone.

All of this is just using the base syncthing and doesn't require any technical skills. Backing up in the cloud needs more time and expertise, but after having done it myself and realizing I don't actually need it (a simple backup is enough, I don't need a web interface to do what I can do faster and more easily from a desktop app) and I can have encrypted backups instead. Bonus: if you're both on the same wifi the sharing is quasi-instantaneous and doesn't waste energy sending to a faraway server first

Unless privacy is a concern (you were on Google photos so far) you might try Dropbox, Amazon, Flickr, One Drive etc. As for self-hosted, think real hard whether you want to be dealing with everything that comes with it.

If I had such a need and privacy was not an issue I would use Dropbox (I already use Dropbox a lot, easy to share, excellent download speeds, and I don't have a huge photo library).

No matter what you do, stay away from iCloud. By God, they have made it so bad that it feels like a criminal offence.

iCloud is great for a hands-off experience. But if you’re accessing photos professionally or even somewhat seriously, I totally agree.

iCloud sucks!

I tell you what I was trying to do just now. Literally minutes ago.

I have photos in "Library" (i.e. the first screen that loads) and I didn't want that. I wanted them in different albums and just stay there. So I added them to different albums. There's no way to "move". They will still show there.

Now you can hide them from "Library" and they will vanish from the Library. Awesome, right? Nope! They vanished from those other albums you had added them into as well. Now those photos are in a special library called "Hidden". Yes, all those photos!

Okay fine. Now you want them back in those albums. So you go to Hidden and select some photos to be added into an album. Everything happens fine it just that the photos still don't show anywhere but only in Hidden. So I guess you will have to first unhide those photos and get them all in Library and then add them all to albums.

And all I wanted was to keep the photos that processed (i.e. moved to diff albums) and the ones not processed separately.

Now I don't even want to start on how my friends exclaim "What kind of service is this? Which company? God such a pathetic download speed!". Those friends are from all over the globe.

Sounds like albums are just tags, which is in general superior to folders.

btw, If you have office 365 subscription, Onedrive has 1TB space to use

If you're interested in a self hosted cloud, take a look at nextcloud.

https://nextcloud.com/

I've been using for a couple months and been extremely happy with it.

Do you manage your own server or do you host it somewhere like AWS/Digital Ocean?

I do, on Digital Ocean.

I'm using DO's Spaces (S3) as file storage. I also suspect very strongly that it is the main source of the slowness of the nextcloud (but it is super cheap!).

The main pain in the ass is having to update every year or so. It usually works flawlessly, until it doesn't and I have to run a few manual commands. Other than that, it just works. 100% recommend it.

Mine is a personal instance, being used by 5 people (family). I've had the nextcloud and its postgres database running in a 5$ instance for years, no problem (I did add a bit of swap for the DB).

I suppose at 5$/month, your instance has 1GB RAM.

I should warn users that such instance may struggle to run even bare minimum nextcloud.

2-4GB is preferred.

True. The Nextcloud docs suggest at least 2GB of RAM.

On the other hand, mine is running at 400MB right now.

I guess it also depends on the frequency and how it is used. We mostly use the apps on the phone and file app integrations (Ubuntu lets you access the files from the Files app).

It is true that it is somewhat slow when loading the website.

How do you handle routine backups of the machine that you host nextcloud on?

I run nextcloud on my home NAS with 8TB of data. I use https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy for backups to azure blob. Strong recommendation from me, I tried so many backup solutions... including Borg, duplicity, rsync, and I don't even remember the rest anymore. Duplicacy's no database solution and support for a zillion destination options really got me.

I love my nextcloud... but I hate its photos experience. I know there are a lot of third party photo apps that work with WebDAV, but I haven't really explored them yet. What do you use?

I would particularly be interested in self-hosted solutions that still support image recognition, which is very useful for large libraries. Does such a thing even exist?

LibrePhotos [0] does that.

[0] https://github.com/LibrePhotos/librephotos

If you use macOS, you can use Apple Photos (with its client-side image recognition) without using iCloud for storage. Just put your Photo Library bundle-directory on a NAS instead, and then either sync it to your local machine, or work with it over SMB.

(Or, for optimal performance, the hybrid solution: put the library in a sparsebundle disk image, put that on the NAS, and then mount the disk image over SMB. This is what Time Machine does under the covers, because it vastly improves the overhead of filesystem operations over directly manipulating the files in SMB.)

Windows also has Microsoft Photos which does client-side indexing of people, places, and objects.

This is what I currently do, but it doesn't expose the output of the object recognition to me. You have to guess what objects it might be able to recognize, and then search for them. I'd rather have the raw data.

(It's also frustrating that the VoiceOver image recognition is far superior to Photos', but is inaccessible to the Photos app.)

Here's a good review of the self-hosted options: https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/lotc2e/google_p...

You can check Lomorage, it is lightweight and you can host it on cheap Orange Pi Zero (and other SBC as well like this cheap rock64 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0868WSTXH?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2_dt_b_...) and run it 7x24. Lomorage comes with Android and iOS APP, easy for backup review and share with family, and WebAPP is still very basic and mainly can be used for import existing photos. AI features is added on iOS but need more refine on UI, currently you can search by text, object, location, it doesn't support face recognition but it's on the roadmap.

https://docs.lomorage.com/docs/Highlight/

You can also check the user pain points survey here: https://lomorage.com/survey/, if you take the survey you should be able to check the result. And another survey result is available, you can use Google translation to check the result: https://www.wenjuan.com/r/n/2f4545567028ee7ba28192f5e0cdb498, it's Chinese version and you can use chrome to translate to English, right click and choose "Translate to English", this survey should cover diverse people with different ages and backgrounds.

Hope this is helpful, thanks for reading!

I recommend Yandex.Disk (disclaimer - I used to work for Yandex) for backing up photos.

It offers free unlimited photo auto-uploads with the original quality. Same for the videos for a very small price.

The app itself is like Google Photos and Google Drive combined, but with fewer features.

Interesting! Is it possible to request that my data be stored outside Russia? Or does the Russian government automatically have access to it?

Some people here suggested Google Takeout for Photos. I did that and I now have a list of 298 separate downloads in my Gmail.

Is there anyway, I can drop that to Dropbox (or another bigger cloud service) without me downloading it off-line and then uploading it?

Dropbox; because I can set a folder to sync "Online Only" and figure out a way to deal with it.

IIRC you should be able to specify your google takeout download size, it can also create 50GB archives.

But no, as far as I understand you have to download and re-upload using a local machine...

Is there perhaps some IFFFT solution for this?

Would you seriously give your entire photo library to another third party just to save some time?

It’s just a suggestion.

I would like to recommend PhotoPrism, a self-hosted alternative to Google Photos.

https://photoprism.app/

Why not just pay for google photos?

They've clearly indicated a desire to try another platform. Why does it matter what the motivation is?

OP mentioned that google is ending the free version, it makes sense to ask them why they don’t pay.

If the reason is because they want a free tier forever, that impacts the recommendation. If the reason is because they think google could shut you out, that may need a completely different recommendation.

Well, for one, if Google's ML decides to nuke your account, you lose your photos unless you have a blog, a lot of upvotes, and luck.

This is gonna be a risk with most cloud services. No matter what, you want to have a backup anyway.

Because they are known for bait and switch; and even worse bait and shutdown? One bad click, or their AI screwing up might lock you out of all your photos and entire Google a/c? Among numerous other reasons.

So while at it move away from one more Google service.

Is the bait an switch comment fair? Google have offered free photos for years and obviously the storage requirements must be growing huge. A business needs to be able to change.

Also haven't they said on both the big changes anything in the past will be held as legacy under free and future uploads will go to storage? I think you have to accept business needs to adapt models sometimes and Google Photos is more this than bait and switch.

Fair call on the lockout. This is a real issue for Google.

They starved out any other provider who could offer photo storage with their free storage. Now they discover they need to charge for it.

Is there any convenient way to back up Google Photos to Backblaze or S3?

Sure, just get a google takeout of your photos data, and whatever else you want backed up, and stick it in S3.

There are afew projects on github that let you configure an API key for google access and pull your photos, without using takeout. https://github.com/dtylman/gitmoo-goog https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync

I run one on my wife's account with a cron job to grab new photos daily.

https://rclone.org/googlephotos/

I'm a long time Google Photos user myself, and have always been disappointed by the lackluster sharing and organizational capabilities in GP -- Google threw AI at the problem and considered it solved.

We're working on a new app that solves those problems by adapting to how actual humans organize and share their memories. We're also making it offline-first (https://twitter.com/cachapa/status/1395321808400883712) and obviously, end-to-end encrypted.

There's more at https://storyark.de, and while you're at it sign up for our upcoming beta test too :-)

The Swiss provider Infomaniak has an offer named kDrive (cf. https://www.infomaniak.com/en/kdrive/prices), at 5.35 CHF per month for 2 TB of space (not only for photos but also for documents, files, etc.). It's more expensive than Google Photos if you have less than 200 GB of data, but is cheaper than Google's 2 TB offer. Moreover, Infomaniak is very committed to user privacy (whence the fact that they don't have so many free services...), unlike Google. They are not very well known outside of the country but are very serious, they do exist since more than 20 years.

Looks nice, but upgrade pricing is a bit steep...

3 TB/month = € 10 (nice)

Add one 5 TB upgrade and it is suddenly €46/month (insane)

didn't see that one :O seems weird pricing indeed...

I’ve been using them for over a year now and they are great. Adding new features often and kDrive is rock stable. The download speeds could be a bit better to the US but I’m willing to accept that for the privacy and quality of the product.

I switched to a personal NAS that has ML categorization: https://www.walmart.com/ip/seort/184909893

I think the Synology NAS do the same.

Make sure you stay on top of QNAP security updates, and don't expose any services online: they're hit regularly and repeatedly by cryptolocker malware.

https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/22/qnap_nas_ransomware_q...

Good thing about my ISP is they have no public IPs. They are too cheap to buy IPs for each home. It's a feature not a bug!

...and then one day they quietly implemented ip6 :)

The problem I have with most of these self-hosted or new tools:

- It's soooooo slow if you are like me and have 50,000-100k+ pictures in all sorts of formats. (RAW, png, gif, jpg)

- There's a real lack of smart and "magical" ML tagging and searching.

- Some I've seen get very confused by the datetime. Like, yes the created date was 2008, but the name of the image is: 'whatsapp-picture-2020-05-22.jpg' or whatever, so obviously show it as a picture from 2020.

Can Google photos (or other service) handle +50k images?

created date 2008, whatsapp-picture-whatever-date might simply be a picture from 2008 that someone sent you over whatsapp on that specific date...

It depends what you want and what you're willing to compromise on I think.

I ended up building my own, which has the advantages it's designed specifically for my needs (but which obviously means it's less likely to be useful for other people with different requirements or workflows).

My two main criteria were: supporting galleries of non-square images (very few solutions support this, they just crop to squares which makes things much easier for layout, but I don't like), and having portable catalogs with the metadata (mine are basically YAML defined metadata per photo, like geo location hierarchies (Europe / France / Paris), tags, categories, such that I am not locked to a DB, and can move the catalogs (and images) around on arbitrary drives / volumes, and can transfer them.

The large downside (although I'm willing to put up with it), is having to fairly manually curate each photo item, but a lot of "tourist photo" style stuff is quite similar for me, so I can share multiple metadata for multiple photos, so it's not too bad.

Does anyone know of a solution with robust search? Google Photos limits what terms it will actually find - whether due to technical limitations, prudishness, or some combination of the two, I don't know, but as an artist who uses my personal archive as an alternative to Pinterest to store reference, it's very frustrating how limited it's become.

I'm using https://mega.io/ has an alternative for Google Drive. Not just for photos. The Windows Client is a LOT faster than Google Drive and with a smaller footprint. It's fast. Works in Linux. And you can use Synology to backup Mega. In the case of Mega goes off.

Hi, We have another open source solution for you - Photonix (https://photonix.org/). We've been working on it for a few years now but it's getting more feature-rich every month.

Key features: web-based, ML auto-detection of objects, colors and styles, map view, Android and iOS apps, ARM/Raspberry Pi support, works with your existing photo folder structure.

Face recognition/matching is almost done and we're also planning a cloud-hosted service for those that don't want to/can't self-host.

For those interested in the tech - the backend is Python, frontend is React-based, ML is done with Tensorflow/Keras, building is done via Docker, APIs use GraphQL.

Hopefully see some of you over at https://github.com/photonixapp/photonix

My father started his self-hosting journey with a similar need. He went with Piwigo (https://piwigo.org/) that seems to fit his requirements.

Not sure I would personally pick that (PHP, documentation misaligned with my concerns...), but it may match others' criteria.

amazon prime gives you unlimited photos storage on top of all the other stuff that's included in prime

I feel it will only be a matter of time before they start charging though (just like how Google is doing). Right now they need all that data to maybe train their models or attract users?

I ended up going on a paid plan for storing other kinds of files (video mostly). You still get unlimited photos as long as you have your prime subscription, so it doesn’t count towards your quota on the paid side. I figure that’s their M.O. - lure you in with unlimited photos because it costs them next to nothing to store photos and then when they want to store other kinds of files it’s less friction to just get a paid plan. Seems to be the same strategy going with prime video because it is also included with prime but I have subscribed to a few channels on top of that so they get money from me that way.

Adobe Lightroom (Classic).

Yes, you pay real money for the stupid cloud model, but — I can add gradient and circular filters, correct for the lens distortion with profiles for most major cameras and lenses (including your iPhone), get one-click perspective correction so a building facade is square against the image plane ... and it's all lossless editing.

You want a map of your photos over time? Of course we have the map. You want facial recognition but locally hosted so it's not creepy? Got ya covered.

There's a cloud-oriented Lightroom these days. I don't use it and don't look forward to when they stop supporting Classic so I'll have to ... switch away yes that's definitely what I'll do 100%

For the record, I don't think Adobe is ever moving away from Lightroom Classic. I think the naming is a bit of a mirage, or more specifically a way to push consumers towards a more valuable (charge for cloud storage), less demanding (objectively less capable), product. A customer paying for Classic and CC, and only using CC is a better customer for Adobe.

But the problem is Adobe Lightroom CC has effectively zero penetration with professional photographers. If I had to summarize the pro market opinion of CC, it would be contempt. Here's an example: This article (https://petapixel.com/2020/01/02///why-im-sticking-with-ligh...), about choosing Classic over CC, has about 100 comments, the maximum allowed, most panning CC. Of those 100, it's easy to find the single positive comment about CC: it's at the bottom, with the most downvotes.

The problem is the whole basis of CC (cloud storage) is antithetical to how professional photographers work (thousands of large photos per shoot). Adobe can't grow CC into eventually supporting this market because it can't support offline storage, because the whole reason CC exists is to have a product that's cloud only...

So I think Adobe will effectively be supporting Classic forever. Here's an example: Adobe has committed to native support for Classic on Apple Silicon (https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/kb/macos-big-sur-c...).

I wonder how long Adobe is going to care about professional photographers for Lightroom. That sounds crazy, I know, but I would bet that the percentage of Lightroom users who are actual working pros is tiny and shrinking. At some point it will be more profitable for Adobe to abandon that tiny and demanding customer group to some other company and focus on prosumers with Lightroom CC.

Pros who need Photoshop will still need Adobe. There is nothing remotely close to replacing Photoshop. And AFAIK, every Lightroom competitor ships with an “open this file in Photoshop” button.

Apple did this with Final Cut. After years of being proud that Real Hollywood Films were edited with Final Cut, they gave up Hollywood and pivoted the product firmly toward prosumers. It has not hurt Apple at all, and probably saved them some money and heartache along the way.

> I wonder how long Adobe is going to care about professional photographers for Lightroom. That sounds crazy, I know, but I would bet that the percentage of Lightroom users who are actual working pros is tiny and shrinking. At some point it will be more profitable for Adobe to abandon that tiny and demanding customer group to some other company and focus on prosumers with Lightroom CC.

This is theoretically possible, but I'd bet against it because of the brand halo effect of having Lightroom Classic be the main tool of professional photographers is too valuable. The second Adobe discontinues Lightroom Classic, the professional market will move to Capture One. That's a dangerous position for Adobe to be in. I wouldn't put it past Adobe to still make this mistake (e.g., see Figma), but I think if they did, it would be a mistake so large that it would shape the future of Adobe as a company. I.e., Adobe will be weaker forever if they do this.

> Apple did this with Final Cut. After years of being proud that Real Hollywood Films were edited with Final Cut, they gave up Hollywood and pivoted the product firmly toward prosumers. It has not hurt Apple at all, and probably saved them some money and heartache along the way.

I do not think Apple is happy about the way Final Cut Pro X turned out. The feedback to Final Cut Pro X was so bad that Steve Jobs personally called Randy Ubillos about it (source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfII0EcbCsg). That's the only time I've ever heard of Steve Jobs getting involved with one of Apple's pro apps.

Consider this: Look at the Mac Pro and in particular, the Pro Display XDR. Which industry were those products made to placate? Do you think Apple is happy that video studios that once would have been running their software on those machines are now running Avid/Premiere? Plus look at the corresponding roll out of Logic Pro X two years later, which was far less of re-imagining than Final Cut Pro X was. I think Apple has learned their lesson. "Success hides problems", from 2010-2020 made some colossally terrible decisions, that we only talk about less because the iPhone has compensated for so much, Final Cut Pro X is one of them.

I’d personally go with creating a nice SPA using S3 for storage. Super cheap and well, you manage your own data that way ( to an extent ).

Plus, design it however you want.

If that seems too much, you can just use Photos ( iCloud ) and pay for the storage. Seems like a good alternative to me.

I tried Mylo but didn't really like it so I ended up with Apple Photos.

At least they "allow" me to have a local copy of my photo library unlike Google. So in any extremely unlikely case they nuke my account, I have my locals.

How did you manage to get a local copy of Apple Photos?

Their API seems not designed to be publicly used, and tools like pyicloud still have their issues with some types of media.

I’m pretty sure OP is referring to Photos for macOS Preferences > iCloud > “Download Originals to this Mac” - you can move your .photoslibrary file to an external or network drive if you need for space reasons.

Then all your files can be accessed with the .photoslibrary file context menu, “Show Package Contents”, “originals” folder.

Correct. There are also third party apps, like PowerPhotos, that let you access, update, move, delete the photos from the library file if you don't like going through Finder.

Photos app on any Mac. Download originals option.

Pixelfed is a federated image sharing based on Activity Pub protocol (compatible with Mastodon, Peertube): https://pixelfed.org/.

Really like how Pixelfed is evolving. A good balanced set of features are added at a good pace. Best way to keep track is via the maintainer's Mastodon account: https://mastodon.social/@dansup

Hi! Arriving a bit late to the party...

We're building ac;pic, a cloud-based service that saves and organizes your pivs (pictures & videos). These are the things we do differently from most of what's out there:

- We use tags, not albums, as the organizational principle. Tags are associative; albums are hierarchical and resemble traditional folder structures (and a file cannot be in two folders at the same time).

- We tackle the overwhelm produced by having tens of thousands of pivs. We aim to replace that overwhelm by an "arcade" feeling, that makes the hard into easy and the easy into trivial.

- We identify duplicated pics & videos regardless of filename or metadata.

- We are a cloud service, but all our code is open source (https://github.com/altocodenl/acpic).

- We charge with a fixed + variable subscription model. The fixed part helps to maintain our fixed costs (salaries, working capital, etc), the variable is what every user pays for space used - at cost, we don't mark up storage prices.

- We use no AI; if we implement some AI in the future, it will be strictly opt-in.

- We allow import from Google Drive & Dropbox, as well as upload from all devices.

- We don't own your data, we only safeguard it. Exporting and importing all your data from and into our service is done as easily as possible.

If you're interested in using ac;pic, you can check it out and request an invite for the upcoming beta at https://altocode.nl/pic/ We'll send you an invite when the app is ready. Our horizon for release is measured in months.

If you're developing another solution that solves the same problem or works in the same area: feel free to contact us and share your experience; or browse our repo to see how we do things. Perhaps we were able to solve a problem that you were trying to solve yourself; our code is public domain, so you can borrow whatever you want from it. We're interested in solving the problem, not necessarily being the only ones that solve it.

The “free storage” was news to me when I heard they were ending it. Turns out this was only for images saved compressed (‘High’ vs Original quality). Since I don’t want my images altered at all I never used that option, and the change is not significant. I don’t recommend that you let Google apply lossy compression to your images to save space, either, unless your photos are not very important.

The earlier Google Pixel phones included free unlimited original quality backup of photos/videos, but in recent phone generations they dropped that, and they also confirmed future Pixel phones won't even get free unlimited compressed backups.

Moved all content to Synology. Then tried Photos and Moments but eventually settled on Photoprism for open source, ease of use, features and UI.

This HN post [1] from a few days ago offers some alternatives to Google Photos [2].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27294703

[2]: https://github.com/pluja/awesome-privacy#photo-storage

There are clearly a lot of self-hosting options.

What frustrates me from moving away from Google Photos is the "last mile" integration into Android that would upload photos from my phone but more, allow me to select images from my greater library in Android's file and photo pickers.

Anyone know something that actually replaces that functionality on Android?

In general, I can't believe there isn't a truly good sync app for android. I use Insync on the PC, and was disappointed to learn they used to have an android app which they discontinued. Currently I use DriveSync Pro to keep a few selected folders two-way-synced to my drive, which mostly works, but after a few weeks of leaving it alone, I open the app and most of the time it has been inactive for a few days.

I use DriveSync Pro and I want to say I had this issue and had to fiddle with the Android app preferences to allow it to run in the background, I may be confusing it with another app issue though.

Depending on your phone manufacturer, you need no disable energy saver feature for the app you want to run background. It might get even more confusing and complicated depending what customization the manufacturer has added to stock Android.

Take a look at nextcloud photos and photoprism.

I have a question (to everyone) that is a bit off topic.

How are you housekeeping your photo library? I'm hosting mine in iCloud, and its size is increasing year after year. I'm close to the 150-200 GB of photos/videos. Deleting photos or videos manually would take a lot of time. How do you do it?

Manually. It does take a lot of time if you're starting from such a large volume, but I don't see the worth of a photo collection if it's so unmanageable that you never look at it. That being said it really doesn't take that long to go through a thousand photos to delete a large percentage.

Obviously it's more manageable if you do it regularly.

If Google keeps a service around, it must be that the service is popular. And you can be sure that the technical features behind the service is well beyond any competitors.

Trust me, Google is not good at product design, that's because they trade it with unmatched technical capabilities.

VPS or cheap shared hosting.

Seriously. This way you're at least owning your data, more or less. Yeah, it costs money, but you own your data. You can always keep backups just in case the hosting company you picked first sucks, but there are tons of good hosting companies out there.

If you are up for self hosting, you could get a nas.

Personally I am using synology. I've got a disk setup that tolerates loss of two disks, and I'm doing nightly backups to the cloud.

We have an app on our phones for syncing pictures and video as they are taken. With no loss of quality.

I see the problem as two distinct functionalities:

- Send the pictures off the mobile device

- Browse the pictures

To send the pictures off the mobile device, I couldn't be happier than with Syncthing - it just works.

For browsing, I just use a file manager at the moment... I guess I like to keep it simple.

Try https://stingle.org - Stingle Photos seamlessly provides strong security, privacy, sharing and encryption. It is also available on f-droid.

https://www.yogile.com. Hands down the easiest way to store and share photos with family, also doesn't sell your data!

If you have a Synology storage device, you can run Moments on it, which has a lot of Photos’ basic feature set. It’s imperfect, but I’ve liked it because I have wholesale control over my photos.

Since this is HN, I'll throw it out there -- I store my photos on Amazon S3 and I use signed imgix urls to share them with people and use imgix to generate thumbnails for galleries.

Check out https://www.albums.app/, a brand new end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos.

https://github.com/Chevereto/Chevereto-Free might be interesting

Is there a self-hosted solution which supports offline object recognition AND searchable OCR of text in images (e.g. so you can search through images of receipts/invoices)?

Looking for something similar.

Nextcloud seems extensible enough for it to work[1][2].

[1] https://help.nextcloud.com/t/search-images-for-content-of-im...

[2] https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/ocr

I have a local nas running zfs and owncloud. I backup my photos to owncloud and while not the same ui/ux, it’s pretty good to share with things with the family.

There's also https://capture-app.com/

is there a front-end (visualization, tagging, upload, dedup etc) where we can use a cloud service backend (AWS S3 etc)?

Amazon Photos? They have free storage for photos, I think there still do, if you’re a prime member at least in the US.

I like Koken: http://koken.me/

Download link has been down for at least months now.

Here's a working Internet Archive cache:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190526161155/http://help.koken...

Why not using a dual plug USB disk ? Like the sandisk dual usb drive ?

Personally I just use syncthing every month or two.

TresorIt, maybe? Its app has a photo/video upload feature f.x.

ente.io is very expensive than Google Photos for storage.

iCloud Photos?

Nextcloud

ente.io is way expensive than Google Photos.

Just get an Pixel 1 and uploas from there.

1. Buy an USB Blu-ray burner and a stack of high quality BD-R (Panasonic Japan, single layer).

2. Sort your photo's by date and archive anything older than 1 or 2 years to disc. If you can't fit any year on 1 disc (25GB), consider tidying up, like our parents told us to do when we were toddlers.

3. Let go of the Fear of losing that sole precious photo from 10 years ago. There are more important things in life.

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