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Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

• fpereiro 5y ago
  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 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/ 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.
• cyberpanther 5y ago
  I switched to a personal NAS that has ML categorization: https://www.walmart.com/ip/seort/184909893 https://www.walmart.com/ip/seort/184909893 I think the Synology NAS do the same.
  • mceachen 5y ago
    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_qlocker_ech0raix/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/22/qnap_nas_ransomware_q...
    • cyberpanther 5y ago
      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!
      • petee 5y ago
        ...and then one day they quietly implemented ip6 :)
• mceachen 5y ago
  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/ https://photostructure.com/ Disclaimer: I'm the (only) author.
  • nexuist 5y ago
    Thank you for building this. I was thinking of building my own but I think I'll try this out!
  • Aeolun 5y ago
    Oh. Deduplication across all drives! Consider me interested. Will try this out later.
    • mceachen 5y ago
      I had boxes and boxes of old drives that I wanted to get organized which drove that feature: https://photostructure.com/about/introducing-photostructure/#physical-vs-digital 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 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/ https://photostructure.com/server/tools/ )
      • Tempest1981 5y ago
        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!
• CallMeJim 5y ago
  Here's a good review of the self-hosted options: https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/lotc2e/google_photo_alternative_showdown/ https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/lotc2e/google_p...
• sys_64738 5y ago
  iCloud Photos?
• LeoPanthera 5y ago
  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?
  • illuminated 5y ago
    LibrePhotos [0] does that. [0] https://github.com/LibrePhotos/librephotos https://github.com/LibrePhotos/librephotos
  • derefr 5y ago
    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.)
    • thekyle 5y ago
      Windows also has Microsoft Photos which does client-side indexing of people, places, and objects.
    • LeoPanthera 5y ago
      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.)
• Snuupy 5y ago
  Take a look at nextcloud photos and photoprism.
• lazyant 5y ago
  is there a front-end (visualization, tagging, upload, dedup etc) where we can use a cloud service backend (AWS S3 etc)?
• dkasper 5y ago
  Why not just pay for google photos?
  • happytoexplain 5y ago
    They've clearly indicated a desire to try another platform. Why does it matter what the motivation is?
    • kyle_morris_ 5y ago
      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.
  • joshmn 5y ago
    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.
    • marticode 5y ago
      This is gonna be a risk with most cloud services. No matter what, you want to have a backup anyway.
  • crossroadsguy 5y ago
    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.
    • Gustomaximus 5y ago
      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.
• fennecfoxen 5y ago
  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%
  • robenkleene 5y ago
    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-lightroom-classic-for-now/ 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-compatibility.html https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/kb/macos-big-sur-c...).
    • snowwrestler 5y ago
      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.
• joshmn 5y ago
  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 https://www.synology.com
  • darau1 5y ago
    Why backblaze? /r/datahoarder also recommends them, but I couldn't find a reason.
    • risyachka 5y ago
      They are very reliable and have a very reasonable price which is hard to find these days.
      • bartvk 5y ago
        Plus, their consumer product is extremely easy to set up so I can recommend it to folks who aren’t computer experts.
    • sp332 5y ago
      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.
    • Nadya 5y ago
      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.
  • arriu 5y ago
    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.
• rubyist5eva 5y ago
  amazon prime gives you unlimited photos storage on top of all the other stuff that's included in prime
  • humanlion87 5y ago
    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?
    • rubyist5eva 5y ago
      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.
• mtlynch 5y ago
  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 https://photoprism.app
  • jessedhillon 5y ago
    >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".
    • StavrosK 5y ago
      PhotoPrism does this too.
  • hanniabu 5y ago
    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?
    • durovo 5y ago
      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.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• crossroadsguy 5y ago
  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.
  • willio58 5y ago
    iCloud is great for a hands-off experience. But if you’re accessing photos professionally or even somewhat seriously, I totally agree.
    • crossroadsguy 5y ago
      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.
      • twobitshifter 5y ago
        Sounds like albums are just tags, which is in general superior to folders.
• berkut 5y ago
  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.
• vishnumohandas 5y ago
  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 https://ente.io [2]: https://github.com/ente-io https://github.com/ente-io [3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/njatok/we_built_an_endtoend_encrypted_alternative_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/njatok/we_built_a...
  • iamthepieman 5y ago
    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.
    • vishnumohandas 5y ago
      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.
      • 0xdky 5y ago
        Especially with a stateless service like a photo hosting service, this is very true. Wish you all the best!
    • jshmrsn 5y ago
      Everything has to start somewhere.
    • totoglazer 5y ago
      I’m at 93k myself…
    • 5y ago
• sircastor 5y ago
  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.
• mithusingh32 5y ago
  If you're interested in a self hosted cloud, take a look at nextcloud. https://nextcloud.com/ https://nextcloud.com/ I've been using for a couple months and been extremely happy with it.
  • samename 5y ago
    Do you manage your own server or do you host it somewhere like AWS/Digital Ocean?
    • galbar 5y ago
      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).
      • aborsy 5y ago
        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.
        • galbar 5y ago
          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.
  • papul1993 5y ago
    How do you handle routine backups of the machine that you host nextcloud on?
• leetrout 5y ago
  https://www.smugmug.com/ https://www.smugmug.com/ and https://www.flickr.com/ 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-interview/ https://mixergy.com/interviews/smugmug-chris-macaskill-inter...
  • ghaff 5y ago
    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.
  • vzaliva 5y ago
    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.
    • sp332 5y ago
      They were owned by Yahoo for a while. Has the management changed since the one that broke your trust?
      • jablan 5y ago
        Why would anyone need to care who sits in the management? The trust was broken by a company.
        • sp332 5y ago
          A company is run by people. It's not like the logo decided to screw users over.
      • vzaliva 5y ago
        Since the new management never offered to restore my trust by going back on the original promise, they are complicit.
• pjs_ 5y ago
  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...
  • hiisukun 5y ago
    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.
    • cyberge99 5y ago
      Second for Lychee. If self-hosting, I would also recommend Piwigo. It has a nice complementary phone app.
  • MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
    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.
    • scambier 5y ago
      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.
• chenzhekl 5y ago
  I would like to recommend PhotoPrism, a self-hosted alternative to Google Photos. https://photoprism.app/ https://photoprism.app/
• wackget 5y ago
  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)?
  • digital_voodoo 5y ago
    Looking for something similar.
  • btdmaster 5y ago
    Nextcloud seems extensible enough for it to work[1][2]. [1] https://help.nextcloud.com/t/search-images-for-content-of-image/43875 https://help.nextcloud.com/t/search-images-for-content-of-im... [2] https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/ocr https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/ocr
• RotaryTelephone 5y ago
  Moved all content to Synology. Then tried Photos and Moments but eventually settled on Photoprism for open source, ease of use, features and UI.
• ping_pong 5y ago
  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.
  • chomp 5y ago
    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?
    • stevage 5y ago
      Because most competitors are much more than $2/mo.
    • weird-eye-issue 5y ago
      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
    • smolyeet 5y ago
      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.
      • Superblazer 5y ago
        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.
• funkaster 5y ago
  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.
• yumraj 5y ago
  Amazon Photos? They have free storage for photos, I think there still do, if you’re a prime member at least in the US.
• umvi 5y ago
  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.
  • LegitShady 5y ago
    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.
  • binbag 5y ago
    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.
  • gregoriol 5y ago
    Not sure how switching from Google to Microsoft is a good idea.
  • jamexcb 5y ago
    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.
  • thorin1 5y ago
    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.
  • 5y ago
• divbzero 5y ago
  This HN post [1] from a few days ago offers some alternatives to Google Photos [2]. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27294703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27294703 [2]: https://github.com/pluja/awesome-privacy#photo-storage https://github.com/pluja/awesome-privacy#photo-storage
• Mister_Snuggles 5y ago
  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 https://www.photosync-app.com/home.html [1] https://www.smugmug.com/ https://www.smugmug.com/
  • exhilaration 5y ago
    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.
    • Aeolun 5y ago
      I think it does, but the method is paginated, so if you have several thousands of photos you have some scrolling to do.
  • WA 5y ago
    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.
  • oarsinsync 5y ago
    > 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.
• hnjst 5y ago
  My father started his self-hosting journey with a similar need. He went with Piwigo (https://piwigo.org/ 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.
• quyleanh 5y ago
  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 https://github.com/pluja/awesome-privacy#photo-storage [2] https://photoprism.app/ https://photoprism.app/ [3] https://photoview.github.io/ https://photoview.github.io/ [4] https://photostructure.com/ https://photostructure.com/ [5] https://github.com/LibrePhotos/librephotos https://github.com/LibrePhotos/librephotos [6] https://github.com/hooram/ownphotos https://github.com/hooram/ownphotos [7] https://nextcloud.com/ https://nextcloud.com/ [8] https://stingle.org/ https://stingle.org/ [9] https://crypt.ee/ https://crypt.ee/ [10] https://ente.io/ https://ente.io/ [11] https://www.digikam.org/ https://www.digikam.org/
  • pseingatl 5y ago
    Picasa?
    • dcuthbertson 5y ago
      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/ https://picasa.google.com/
  • qbonnard 5y ago
• akkartik 5y ago
  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.
  • fy20 5y ago
    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.
  • Brajeshwar 5y ago
    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.
    • CharlesW 5y ago
      > 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.
  • masten 5y ago
    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/ https://stingle.org/
• vim-guru 5y ago
  There's also https://capture-app.com/ https://capture-app.com/
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• dheera 5y ago
  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.
• Brajeshwar 5y ago
  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 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.
  • amenod 5y ago
    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-assistant-tab-for-you/ https://www.xda-developers.com/google-photos-renames-assista...
  • CharlesW 5y ago
    > 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.
    • Brajeshwar 5y ago
      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?"
• justicezyx 5y ago
  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.
• code_duck 5y ago
  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.
  • Ashanmaril 5y ago
    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.
• Brajeshwar 5y ago
  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.
  • isoprophlex 5y ago
    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...
  • lethologica 5y ago
    Is there perhaps some IFFFT solution for this?
    • jannes 5y ago
      Would you seriously give your entire photo library to another third party just to save some time?
      • lethologica 5y ago
        It’s just a suggestion.
• fsflover 5y ago
  Pixelfed is a federated image sharing based on Activity Pub protocol (compatible with Mastodon, Peertube): https://pixelfed.org/ https://pixelfed.org/.
  • rapnie 5y ago
    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 https://mastodon.social/@dansup
• netcrash 5y ago
  Try https://stingle.org https://stingle.org - Stingle Photos seamlessly provides strong security, privacy, sharing and encryption. It is also available on f-droid.
• ale42 5y ago
  The Swiss provider Infomaniak has an offer named kDrive (cf. https://www.infomaniak.com/en/kdrive/prices 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.
  • leokennis 5y ago
    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)
    • ale42 5y ago
      didn't see that one :O seems weird pricing indeed...
  • replwoacause 5y ago
    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.
• gukoff 5y ago
  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.
  • hoschicz 5y ago
    Interesting! Is it possible to request that my data be stored outside Russia? Or does the Russian government automatically have access to it?
• tekkertje 5y ago
  https://www.yogile.com https://www.yogile.com. Hands down the easiest way to store and share photos with family, also doesn't sell your data!
• liotier 5y ago
  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.
• tammireddy 5y ago
  ente.io is way expensive than Google Photos.
• MortenToudahl 5y ago
  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.
• tammireddy 5y ago
  ente.io is very expensive than Google Photos for storage.
• oliwarner 5y ago
  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?
  • chronolitus 5y ago
    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.
    • fletchowns 5y ago
      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.
    • Dma54rhs 5y ago
      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.
• em500 5y ago
  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.
• 271828182846 5y ago
  TresorIt, maybe? Its app has a photo/video upload feature f.x.
• rataata_jr 5y ago
  Nextcloud
• jamexcb 5y ago
  I'm using https://mega.io/ 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.
• rootsudo 5y ago
  Just get an Pixel 1 and uploas from there.
• kilroy123 5y ago
  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.
  • jarenmf 5y ago
    Can Google photos (or other service) handle +50k images?
  • ale42 5y ago
    created date 2008, whatsapp-picture-whatever-date might simply be a picture from 2008 that someone sent you over whatsapp on that specific date...
• erikbye 5y ago
  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.
  • jk7tarYZAQNpTQa 5y ago
    > 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.
    • Griffinsauce 5y ago
      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.
      • virgoerns 5y ago
        > 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.
        • squiggleblaz 5y ago
          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.
• cachapa 5y ago
  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 https://twitter.com/cachapa/status/1395321808400883712) and obviously, end-to-end encrypted. There's more at https://storyark.de https://storyark.de, and while you're at it sign up for our upcoming beta test too :-)
• kissgyorgy 5y ago
  Nextcloud! I can't praise and recommend them enough! https://nextcloud.com/ 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 https://github.com/nextcloud/photos and another one where you can put all your photos on a map: https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/maps https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/maps
  • saint-loup 5y ago
    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.)
• uptown 5y ago
  I like Koken: http://koken.me/ http://koken.me/
  • romseb 5y ago
    Download link has been down for at least months now.
    • uptown 5y ago
      Here's a working Internet Archive cache: https://web.archive.org/web/20190526161155/http://help.koken.me/customer/portal/articles/632102-installation https://web.archive.org/web/20190526161155/http://help.koken...
• happynacho 5y ago
  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.
  • WhyNotHugo 5y ago
    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.
    • happynacho 5y ago
      Photos app on any Mac. Download originals option.
    • dustyharddrive 5y ago
      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.
      • happynacho 5y ago
        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.
• bsanr2 5y ago
  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.
• tr1ll10nb1ll 5y ago
  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.
• cabraca 5y ago
  https://github.com/Chevereto/Chevereto-Free https://github.com/Chevereto/Chevereto-Free might be interesting
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• lma21 5y ago
  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?
  • benhurmarcel 5y ago
    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.
• drdavid 5y ago
  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.
• jayFu 5y ago
  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_product_details 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/ https://docs.lomorage.com/docs/Highlight/ You can also check the user pain points survey here: https://lomorage.com/survey/ 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 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!
• damianmoore 5y ago
  Hi, We have another open source solution for you - Photonix (https://photonix.org/ 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 https://github.com/photonixapp/photonix
• johnchristopher 5y ago
  Why not using a dual plug USB disk ? Like the sandisk dual usb drive ? Personally I just use syncthing every month or two.
• calltrak 5y ago
  I like to use https://picc.io https://picc.io for sharing images as a link. No logins. It's simple and clean!
• max9nc9 5y ago
  Check out https://www.albums.app/ https://www.albums.app/, a brand new end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos.