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Comment by akkartik | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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.

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