HACKER Q&A
📣 fffdeeeev

Google Photos Alternatives?


I've been using Google Photos and it's pretty amazing, the search is amazing, auto-sync with families/friends (you add a folder and tell all the pictures from X will be added into this shared library. It's pretty amazing these features.

I'm wondering if there is a competitor for this, or what people is using. I want to de-googlify as much as a I can.

  👤 aceazzameen Accepted Answer ✓
I back up my photos with Google Photos and Dropbox simultaneously. Dropbox syncs them all at full resolution to my desktop, where I surprisingly still have Google Picasa installed (still so fast and so good!). But truth be told, I rarely open Picasa or view the photos on my desktop these days. If I'm sharing a photo, I still share through Google Photos (when the other user also has a gmail account). And searching through photos on Google Photos is the easiest. But it's nice to know I still have a full res backup on a different platform + local hard drives if I have to drop my Google account tomorrow.
👤 mceachen
I'm not aiming to replace Google Photos specifically, but you might want to try PhotoStructure: I'm the author.

I wrote it to sweep all the photos and videos from 30+ HDDs I've accumulated from prior servers and backups and laptops into one neat deduplicated pile, free from invalid or corrupt or bitrotted copies.

There's a fast web-based front end that uses random sampling and hierarchical tagging to find stuff quickly, and to make browsing feel serendipitous.

ML-powered search is coming in a future release. Something like CLIP is looking to be the most promising currently, rather than auto-tagging and then indexing those tags.

Lots more details are here: https://photostructure.com/faq/why-photostructure/

Regardless of using PhotoStructure or not: if you self-host (anything!), please be sure to figure out a backup strategy for your data. I wrote this article to help: https://photostructure.com/faq/how-do-i-safely-store-files/

👤 geoah
I’m pretty happy with https://photoprism.app so far. It’s self hosted, has features I really wanted such as maps and face recognition for grouping photos. Only issue is the lack of a mobile app for viewing photos but their mobile web version is not that bad. I’m using an app they suggested to sync my photos from ios and have photoprism automatically import and process the new photos. Do try it out.
👤 poulpy123
Highjacking the thread to know if there is a way to synchronise the pictures from Google photos to my computer? I mostly take pics with my phone now
👤 the2ndfloorguy
Super happy with https://ente.io/. Folks at ente are amazing.