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Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos

11 points by xenator ↗ HN
I have a real problem. For many years I had Google Photos. It was advertised as free forever, and I uploaded all my old archives from hard drive to cloud service. I never overused it, but global enshittification of Google poisoned this service also at some point. I partially agree with this move, even if I already pay Google for Youtube and watch advertisement I decided to pay for the storage and subscribed to Google One.

About month ago, Google somehow scammed me to switch plan with their unfamous woke AI. I thought they would try to lure me to taste Gemini and if it is ok then I will decide to switch from ChatGPT or other services I pay. But as soon as I switched, I found that now the price for Google One is 10-12 times more with storage I don't need. I barely use 1 Tb with 15 years of contents. Shame on me I trusted Google again with my personal data.

So, now I have time until July 31, 2024 to transfer all my photos and data to somewhere else. Because Google One doesn't provide any options to switch back to my old 2 Tb plan. Funny part that I paid for my 2 Tb plan upfront for one year and spend about just half of this period.

What do you recommend as an alternative to Google Photos and how can I save my data? I remember that they use internal format to store images and once they ask me to switch to this format to save data. Did you recover from this move and were able to restore all your family photos?

I need something reliable with phone backup application. Preferably with a family plan. We mostly use Apple phones and computers with my wife and kids.

18 comments

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hnthrowaway0328
I'm thinking about the same thing. Maybe I can make a native application that sync photos between the phone, the PC and a cloud bucket? And put up some code to display the photos.

Doesn't sound too hard?

Tomte
That‘s PhotoSync.
hnthrowaway0328
Ah exactly what I need, I knew someone made a product, thanks.
xenator
Thank you! I need to look into this.
nicbou
Syncthing works really well for this.
BMc2020
https://takeout.google.com/

Google Photos Transferring photos to another service such as Flickr & One Drive is now available.

xenator
Thank you, I requested the data. Let's see what it will give me.
vishnumohandas
Hey, we're building Ente[1] as an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos.

If it helps, Ente has been previously discussed on HN[2][3].

To answer your questions, we support imports from Google Takeout[4], and we stitch together metadata from their sidecar files to make your library whole.

We also support Family Plans[5] and have open source apps[6] for every platform.

Let me know if you have more questions, would be happy to help!

[1]: https://ente.io

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39570692

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28347439

[4]: https://help.ente.io/photos/migration/from-google-photos/

[5]: https://help.ente.io/photos/features/family-plans

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

quinncom
Is it possible to use Ente just for the album sharing feature? I would like to upload a couple dozen images to a gallery and shared the link on social media. It’s not clear if I have save to give it access to all my photos to be able to use that feature. Ideally, I’d be able to create and share an album directly from Apple Photos to Ente.
vishnumohandas
Yes, you can do just that.

If you're using our mobile app, you can grant permissions to access specific images (instead of the whole gallery), and configure Ente to just back those up.

Once they've been backed up, you can create an album and share it with a link that comes with some configurations of its own[1].

Now if you are using our web app, you can ignore permissions bit altogether, and just create an album with the images you care about, and create a public link for that album.

[1]: https://ente.io/blog/powerful-links/

reify
Personally I store everything personal offline.

Much Safer.

I have 2 x 2TB drives.

Formatted to Exfat (I am a linux user, they are not.) so my family can get access when I die.

If you are in Europe:

Kdrive

https://www.infomaniak.com/en/kdrive

15GB free storage for photos, etc

2Tb storage = monthly CHF5.54 or $5.52 or £4.40

The swiss know how to do it properly.

al_borland
If you’re mostly using Apple phones and computers, why not use iCloud’s Photo Library?
quinncom
Apple Photos is pretty good. Sync works well, the apps are decent, and the automatic OCR/AI search is very helpful.

I’m disappointed that sharing an album isn’t possible with Lockdown Mode enabled.

al_borland
Is there a reason you need lockdown mode enabled? I thought that was for politicians and public figures that had a high likelihood of targeted attacks.
quinncom
I think Apple minimizes the importance of Lockdown Mode because nontechnical users will be confused when some things break when it is enabled, resulting in poor user experience and increased support burden.

Lockdown Mode does effectively block active zero-click exploits.[1][2] Despite who you are, how does it feel knowing your device is hackable and that there is an option that makes it less hackable? Considering that Lockdown Mode has almost no downsides for technical users (other than disabling shared albums), I think most people should have it enabled. I'm not a public figure, but I am a sysadmin that manages resources for many clients. I'm not likely to be targeted, but I'm not going to disable it (and thus make my devices vulnerable) just so I can share photo albums.

[1] https://citizenlab.ca/2023/04/nso-groups-pegasus-spyware-ret... [2] https://www.wired.com/story/apple-iphone-spyware-101/

petabyt
I setup Immich in a few minutes with an old PC running FreeNAS: https://immich.app/

Their Android/iOS Flutter app needs some polishing, but overall it's very usable and very similar to Google Photos.

evnix
Sticking to Google photos because I can search for my driving license just by searching 'license' or first 2-3 digits of my license number and it does it for me or search through photo captures of bills and documents by just entering partial Ids or any text the document might have like 'tax 2023'.

I think its OCR and image search is what keeping me hostage there.