Alternatives to Google Photos?

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

[2]: https://github.com/ente-io

[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/njatok/we_built_a...

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

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.

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/

Disclaimer: I'm the (only) author.

Nextcloud! I can't praise and recommend them enough! 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

and another one where you can put all your photos on a map: https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/maps

https://www.smugmug.com/ and 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-inter...

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

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...

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

[2] https://photoprism.app/

[3] https://photoview.github.io/

[4] https://photostructure.com/

[5] https://github.com/LibrePhotos/librephotos

[6] https://github.com/hooram/ownphotos

[7] https://nextcloud.com/

[8] https://stingle.org/

[9] https://crypt.ee/

[10] https://ente.io/

[11] https://www.digikam.org/

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.

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.

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

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.

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

[1] https://www.smugmug.com/

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.

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.

If you're interested in a self hosted cloud, take a look at nextcloud.

https://nextcloud.com/

I've been using for a couple months and been extremely happy with it.

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?

Here's a good review of the self-hosted options: https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/lotc2e/google_p...

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_...) 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/

You can also check the user pain points survey here: 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, 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!

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.

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.

I would like to recommend PhotoPrism, a self-hosted alternative to Google Photos.

https://photoprism.app/

Why not just pay for google photos?

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) and obviously, end-to-end encrypted.

There's more at https://storyark.de, and while you're at it sign up for our upcoming beta test too :-)

The Swiss provider Infomaniak has an offer named kDrive (cf. 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.

I switched to a personal NAS that has ML categorization: https://www.walmart.com/ip/seort/184909893

I think the Synology NAS do the same.

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.

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.

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.

I'm using 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.

Hi, We have another open source solution for you - Photonix (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

My father started his self-hosting journey with a similar need. He went with Piwigo (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.

amazon prime gives you unlimited photos storage on top of all the other stuff that's included in prime

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%

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.

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.

Pixelfed is a federated image sharing based on Activity Pub protocol (compatible with Mastodon, Peertube): https://pixelfed.org/.

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).

- 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/ 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.

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.

Moved all content to Synology. Then tried Photos and Moments but eventually settled on Photoprism for open source, ease of use, features and UI.

This HN post [1] from a few days ago offers some alternatives to Google Photos [2].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27294703

[2]: https://github.com/pluja/awesome-privacy#photo-storage

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?

Take a look at nextcloud photos and photoprism.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Try https://stingle.org - Stingle Photos seamlessly provides strong security, privacy, sharing and encryption. It is also available on f-droid.

https://www.yogile.com. Hands down the easiest way to store and share photos with family, also doesn't sell your data!

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.

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.

Check out https://www.albums.app/, a brand new end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos.

https://github.com/Chevereto/Chevereto-Free might be interesting

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)?

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.

There's also https://capture-app.com/

is there a front-end (visualization, tagging, upload, dedup etc) where we can use a cloud service backend (AWS S3 etc)?

Amazon Photos? They have free storage for photos, I think there still do, if you’re a prime member at least in the US.

I like Koken: http://koken.me/

Why not using a dual plug USB disk ? Like the sandisk dual usb drive ?

Personally I just use syncthing every month or two.

TresorIt, maybe? Its app has a photo/video upload feature f.x.

ente.io is very expensive than Google Photos for storage.

iCloud Photos?

Nextcloud

ente.io is way expensive than Google Photos.

Just get an Pixel 1 and uploas from there.

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.