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Ask HN: Google Photos Alternatives?

19 points by fffdeeeev ↗ HN
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.

12 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 37.9 ms ] thread
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.
fffdeeeev
I tried this and it’s pretty good.
aceazzameen
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.
fffdeeeev
That’s more or less what I’m doing. I’m syncing with apple photos. I have iPhone, so I also use iCloud easily.
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/

mig4ng
I'd say having a mobile app (both android and iOS) is a must for a product like this
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
frederikb
Technically there is no way for a lossless synchronization/export out of Google Photos apart from using Google Takeout to the best of my knowledge.

For reference check the best effort project https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync and the "Known Issues with Google API" section.

In short: * photos lose some metadata including GPS * You will lose your RAW images (AFAIK) * videos are always transcoded with a lossy conversion

I've walked into the same trap. I'll probably use Google Takeout to hopefully recover my own data and treat Google Photos as an ephemeral destination from now on.

mceachen
This is what I've found as well. Although Google Takeout is strictly better than pulling your files down via their API, even the metadata in takeouts can be mucked with.

I'd strongly recommend only using Google Photos as what it is: a _lossy_ backup (that gets expensive if you have a big library).

If you care about your originals, use one of the several applications that allow your phone to backup your originals directly to your server (either at home or that you're renting). Here's a list of apps that do this:

https://photostructure.com/faq/how-do-i-safely-store-files/#...

Also, Google Takeout can be persnickety. In doing customer support for PhotoStructure users, I've compiled a list of workarounds if it errors out for you: https://photostructure.com/faq/takeout/#step-1-create-a-new-...