What are some google photos alternatives? I’m aware of Ente (not European), crypt.ee and zeitkapsl (saw someone mention it uses google apis). Also don’t fancy going down the self-hosting route for the moment.
What are some google photos alternatives? I’m aware of Ente (not European), crypt.ee and zeitkapsl (saw someone mention it uses google apis). Also don’t fancy going down the self-hosting route for the moment.
I used Google photos just to have my pictures and videos automatically uploaded from my phone when I took them and to the cloud, with the added perk that they could be viewed and shared online if I felt like it. I’m not sure if there’s anything more to it?
If not, I recomend Nextcloud managed by some hosting provider. Hetzner is German and probably the cheapest option out there. I use Murena from France, as I’m fine paying a little more because they develop my phone OS. It’s still a lot cheaper for me than my Dropbox subscription was, and I couldn’t be happier with how Nextcloud works.
The fact that it’s the same apps and functionality between different providers also makes it easier to switch down the road if necessary, whereas other providers might try to lock you into their app ecosystems in order to make you stick with them even as they increase prices or make their services worse.
Google Photos has a great search engine – I can look up “dog” and it will find all the photos with a dog in them, or search for a place and find all the shots from there. You can select a face in one photo, and it will find all the photos of that person.
The albums are awesome too, since you can share them so all invited people can add their own photos. Perfect for weddings, birthday parties, and events in general.
I’m self hosting Immich. I honestly get much better results from their search than I do from Google photos. It’s not quite as mature, but it’s definitely good enough!
I searched my Immich instance for ‘Camera obscura’ because I knew I had a picture of one that I took years ago, but had no idea when… and it found it. Not sure Google would have been that good
How do you self host? Do you use a NAS? What kind of backup system do you use?
I run it off my Home Assistant. The images are stored on my Western Digital MyCloud EX2 Ultra (which is kinda crap, but works) on a RAID1 volume, which is mirrored onto a similar NAS in the other end of the house. Ideally it should be off-site, but I haven’t been able to find a good spot yet.
Yeah, the machine learning functionality is missing in Nextcloud as far as I’m aware, and I remember it being pretty cool when it rolled out in Google photos (though that’s also why I deleted all my stuff from there - I wear a tin foil hat). Personally I’m waiting for a good open source photo management software to handle it locally (I remember seeing Shotwell was working on face recognition), but that’s hardly a solution at all.