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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

A number of good third-party photo-browsing apps make it non-miserable, even if you never open Google Photos or even uninstall it.

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I've seen a lot of people saying this generally but no specific recommendations.

I've used Simple Gallery Pro before but it's not very good.

Currently using Immich but that's not really a general photo app - it's got a narrow use case - so I still use the Google Photos app alongside it quite often.

Specific alternative recommendations that aren't malware welcome.

It depends which features you need, but interestingly Google has another, lighter weight gallery app called Google Gallery that does not have any cloud features built in.

Fossify Gallery (on Fdroid or Google store) works quite nicely for me as a nice and simple photo viewer and management app.

Simple Gallery Pro is what I use, and it seems fine to me. What do you think should be added to it, or altered? Just curious how other people see UX.

I can't personally vouch for it as I'm still stuck in Google Photos and would prefer to self-host it, but Ente may interest you. Open source, end-to-end encrypted, self-host or cloud.

I'm really happy with Immich & not looking for a replacement. Evaluated it vs Ente in the past & went with it instead - as far as I could tell their apps have the same features & limitations (focus on remote backup & display rather than on local on-device photo management & basic markup/editing).

If (like me) you don't need e2e I can highly recommend Immich for its use-case though.

> I've used Simple Gallery Pro before but it's not very good.

It's rock solid for me. you can browse folders move, copy, hide small edits. you can't search 'dog' which is a plus, it doesn't scan faces.

you might want to look into fossify.org as simple tools(of which simple gallery pro was a part of) has been sold to an israeli adware company.

see: https://github.com/SimpleMobileTools/General-Discussion/issu...

im aware. i believe i transferred

i use aves[1] which has many features. especially useful if you travel and take pictures a lot.

[1]: https://github.com/deckerst/aves

This looks potentially great, thanks. I'll give it a try.

> or even uninstall it

Unfortunately google's camera app will only open google photos if you click the image preview after taking one. Just doesn't respect the default gallery app setting at all.

The camera app opened Simple Gallery Pro for me no problem back when I used it. I've been back using Google Photos for a while now so perhaps the camera app has regressed since.

Yeah, unfortunately nowadays all you get is this:

https://i.imgur.com/QVkvrH9.png

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