Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

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 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

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.

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.

Is the bait an switch comment fair? Google have offered free photos for years and obviously the storage requirements must be growing huge. A business needs to be able to change.

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.

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.