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Comment by qntmfred | Hacker News Reader

can I piggyback this post to see if anybody has any good alternatives to Google Photos? I've been a happy user for years, but I increasingly worry that Google doesn't have the resources/focus anymore to rely on them to keep all my memories safe. automatic backup of photos/videos on my phone is the killer feature for me.

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I can highly recommend Ente Photos[0]. It has automatic backup, and a very good replication architecture for maximum reliability[1]. It's also super easy to use and everything is encrypted by default.

[0] https://ente.io/

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

Aside from obvious privacy advantages, is the software better than/on par with Google Photos? Their object detection is top-notch(I guess that's what you get when there's literally whole internet worth of data we give them) and it's one of the major things that my partner uses it. I don't think she'll be happy with lesser one for effectively double the price...

The app definitely has a great UI and usability. It also has ML-based search[0]. Not sure how both compare exactly to Google Photos since it's a very long time since I've used that, but I'd say it's probably at least on par.

[1]: https://ente.io/blog/image-search-with-clip-ggml/

I host my own Seafile server behind a wireguard vpn that I use for cloud file storage. I love it. There's an app that runs on my phone that automatically uploads photos whenever I take them. Highly recommend!

https://www.seafile.com

https://github.com/immich-app/immich

Runs on my Android device, auto backing up photos and videos. I've been running this for over a year - it's great.

I’m running Immich on my home server and it has been great. The syncing on iOS doesn’t seem to want to automatically upload so I have to manually go in and click the sync button sometimes. Otherwise it’s been great!

Weird, iOS here too and syncing works. Sometimes takes a minute for a photo I just took to show up in the app but it will eventually. Is that what you mean?

Same here. Feels so good to have my photos under my control. Make sure they’re backed up properly though!!!

NextCloud can auto-upload from your phone. If you want better tagging/photo management on top of that, you can setup PhotoPrism with it.

If you don't want to self-host, you can get a NextCloud storage share from Hetzner.

I find https://simplemobiletools.com/index.html decent, but not sure if it supports automatic backup.

I think Dropbox has all the features you mentioned from Google Photos, except possibly for tag-style albums instead of directory-style, and photo-focused tooling such as cropping and so on.

I have all my photos sync to my Synology NAS. Because of iOS restrictions, I have to open the specific photo app probably once a month (there’s an accompanying reminder), but other than that, it’s very set and forget.

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