[0] https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-changes/
[1] https://www.techradar.com/how-to/best-google-photos-alternat...
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...
We had started off as a self-hosted project, but ran into difficulties monetizing that model. We wanted to pay our rents, and continue working on this, and an E2EE SaaS was a way forward.
We are not averse to supporting a self-hosted version in the future. But that commitment requires engineering and support bandwidth, which we don’t have right now.
> We've already preserved 100,000+ files, and are quite reliable at this point.
"quite reliable" doesn't cut it for a paid service for me, even a new one.
My second issue, and I might be wrong about this, is that there's no way to share photos with someone who isn't a (paying) ente user.
As an engineer, I shy away from using superlatives. But sorry, I now understand that this could have been phrased better. Thank you for pointing it out.
> no way to share photos
Correction, the receiver can be on the free plan.
Is that the total number of files on your platform? Not to be rude, but is this supposed to be impressive or reassuring? My photo collection is approaching half that number, and I'm just one person, so now I'm feeling completely underwhelmed by the claim.
But you're right, the number is minuscule compared to where we are hoping to be. We're just getting started and I'm hopeful that we will 10x this number in the next few months.
Do you have an public API? I'd love to have a tiny sync client to fetch photos and store them on my laptop.
If your current use case is only to sync your uploaded files to a local folder, we have an Electron app that does just that: https://github.com/ente-io/bhari-frame/releases/tag/v1.0.3
If it’s degooglers then perhaps convincing us it has everything Google Photos had is job number 1. If it’s missing feature X then you’ve got a reason to say no, if it’s at parity then it comes down to whether we trust YOU and is the deal good enough.
You’ve already convinced us you’re not Google so there is some things implied but you need to lean into it. Privacy, not having you information used for ad targeting, never sharing our photos or information derived with third parties - those are all thing to highlight (be the anti-Google).
I think you need some other killer feature or appeal that makes you different than iCloud here since Apple are already the anti-Google. I think you can also get 2TB of iCloud Photo storage for $10 a month so you gotta hit that if you want to charge $15 for 500GB.
As for personnel costs, a few more hundred paying users and we'll be set. Feedback from existing users have been positive, and we should be able to reach that point by end of the year.
It helps that we're living in one of the cheaper parts of the globe, and are not motivated by money. We're building this because an easy to use, privacy friendly alternative needs to exist.
What about latency concerns for people who are not based in EU? I saw on that website that the servers are hosted in EU, and say I need to use it in Asia will have service have usable latency?
If you find observable latency within the service, please write to vishnu[at]ente.io. I will see what we can do.
Feedback: You can improve your website looks.
Goodluck
Regarding the website, I would be grateful if you could point out the worst part(s). I would love to improve.
Tagging faces and objects is on our roadmap, we will ship it.
[1]: https://web.ente.io
I personally use iCloud, and back everything to a Synology.
As always, we don’t sell your information to anyone, and we don’t use information in apps where you primarily store personal content—such as Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Photos—for advertising purposes, period.
https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/keeping-priva...
Some of the tools recommended are:
The main failure mode I'm concerned about is if Google decides I'm no longer worthy of an account. In that case I'll still have my pics and I'll put in the effort to set up some other service.
[0] : https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...
There's also an active forum for both support and to discuss what and how new features are built out.
Disclaimer: I'm the (only) author.
I know you previously responded that people should upvote that feature, but the inability to distinguish video from photo just seems like a must have fix over other potentially over engineered stuff that others are asking for.
- The de-duplication didn't seem to work, it at least was defeated by my messy files. I spent many hours manually going through the results and finding many dupes. Then I lost interest in doing that and gave up.
- can't use datestamp info in the filename?
- very, very slow to sync from my external USB 3 drive. I'd be happy with that if the de-duplication worked. Also the status about what it's doing seems sporadic and half the time appears to be doing nothing at all. Maybe my laptop is too slow?
- no map view
Yes: out of an abundance of caution, the unique (by SHA) variations of each asset are copied into your library. There are heuristics that pick which is the "best," and although those heuristics seem to be robust for most beta users, I didn't want to be the source of want data loss.
> datestamp info in the filename?
The metadata in the file is trusted more than any date extracted either from the filename or the directory hierarchy. Details are here: https://photostructure.com/faq/captured-at/
If you use the info tool, it'll tell you how it's extracting the date from any given file: https://photostructure.com/server/tools/#file-information
> slow to sync
PhotoStructure scales imports to accommodate current hardware, in Ann effort to keep the system responsive. Parallelism is limited by available RAM and CPU count. If you think it was being too conservative, please send me a screen shot of your about page (it includes both system metrics and what is thinking for scheduling limits), and if you want, debug logs, and we can look into what's going on. https://photostructure.com/faq/error-reports/#how-to-manuall...
> no map view
This is a popular feature request that I'm looking forward to building: https://forum.photostructure.com/t/support-reverse-geocoding...
- [1] <https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22photostructu...>
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
(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/photostructure-for-servers...
So while at it move away from one more Google service.
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.
I run one on my wife's account with a cron job to grab new photos daily.
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...
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.
All of this is just using the base syncthing and doesn't require any technical skills. Backing up in the cloud needs more time and expertise, but after having done it myself and realizing I don't actually need it (a simple backup is enough, I don't need a web interface to do what I can do faster and more easily from a desktop app) and I can have encrypted backups instead. Bonus: if you're both on the same wifi the sharing is quasi-instantaneous and doesn't waste energy sending to a faraway server first
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.
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.
Also, the OP doesn't need to get rid of Google Photos. They can keep Google Photos as a off-site back-up.
I third this recommendation.
I use the pointy clicky AWS Glacier backups app in case everything goes sideways.
I looked into other services but nobody seemed to compete, especially since I needed ~250gb minimum.
Do your own tests, but Web and Windows filessystems get out of sync easily.
Pausing/unpausing the client does not work, resetting seems dangerous and I'd prefer not to do it.
Chris MacAskill founded it with his son. Pretty solid company, seems like.
https://mixergy.com/interviews/smugmug-chris-macaskill-inter...
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
[3] https://photoview.github.io/
[4] https://photostructure.com/
[5] https://github.com/LibrePhotos/librephotos
[6] https://github.com/hooram/ownphotos
[10] https://ente.io/
It seems that the expect people to manually pick photos to upload one by one via their website and also figure out which ones you've already uploaded and not pick those again.
Basically the really hard part of syncing photos needs to be done manually.
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.
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].
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.
- 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.
I've been using for a couple months and been extremely happy with it.
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).
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.
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".
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 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-assista...
FWIW, this is trivial these days. We have a “Family Album” that everyone can see, search, add to, etc.
I thought I could use shared albums to pool everyone's photos and use that pool to make backups, but that's not possible. Which isn't at all clear to people, in my experience.
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?"
(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.)
(It's also frustrating that the VoiceOver image recognition is far superior to Photos', but is inaccessible to the Photos app.)
If you need a service pay for it monthly. If you need disks for storage pay for it once.
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.
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.
You are storing gigabytes of files on a remote server, which costs a lot of money, and get services to modify or whatever your pictures remotely...
And, compared to Linux, it works out of the box... (ok, this was a troll).
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.
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.
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.
But no, as far as I understand you have to download and re-upload using a local machine...
3 TB/month = € 10 (nice)
Add one 5 TB upgrade and it is suddenly €46/month (insane)
- 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.
[1] https://help.nextcloud.com/t/search-images-for-content-of-im...
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
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.
I think the Synology NAS do the same.
https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/22/qnap_nas_ransomware_q...
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%
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-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-c...).
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.
Their API seems not designed to be publicly used, and tools like pyicloud still have their issues with some types of media.
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?
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?
Obviously it's more manageable if you do it regularly.
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!
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 :-)
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.
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
Not sure I would personally pick that (PHP, documentation misaligned with my concerns...), but it may match others' criteria.
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.
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.
Trust me, Google is not good at product design, that's because they trade it with unmatched technical capabilities.
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.
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.
- 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.
Personally I just use syncthing every month or two.
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.