Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 317 posts

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#31

Post by crossroadsguy »

willio58 wrote: post #25
crossroadsguy wrote: post #24

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…

iCloud is great for a hands-off experience. But if you’re accessing photos professionally or even somewhat seriously, I totally agree.

iCloud sucks!

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.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#32

Post by derefr »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #9

I would particularly be interested in self-hosted solutions that still support image recognition, which is very useful for large libraries. Does such a thing even exist?

If you use macOS, you can use Apple Photos (with its client-side image recognition) without using iCloud for storage. Just put your Photo Library bundle-directory on a NAS instead, and then either sync it to your local machine, or work with it over SMB.

(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.)

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#33

Post by darau1 »

joshmn wrote: post #20

I use a Synology[0] NAS and use their Photos software with an additional backup to both rsync.net and BackBlaze, in addition to using Google Photos — which I'll happily pay for. (humor my redundancy: I'm extra paranoid about losing memories of my mother.) [0] https://www.synology.com

Why backblaze? /r/datahoarder also recommends them, but I couldn't find a reason.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#35

Post by pjs_ »

Not even remotely an alternative in terms of usability/reliability, but I can describe my DIY setup.

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...

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#36

Post by thekyle »

derefr wrote: post #32
LeoPanthera wrote: post #9

I would particularly be interested in self-hosted solutions that still support image recognition, which is very useful for large libraries. Does such a thing even exist?

If you use macOS, you can use Apple Photos (with its client-side image recognition) without using iCloud for storage. Just put your Photo Library bundle-directory on a NAS instead, and then either sync it to your local machine, or work with it over SMB. (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…

Windows also has Microsoft Photos which does client-side indexing of people, places, and objects.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#37

Post by risyachka »

darau1 wrote: post #33
joshmn wrote: post #20

I use a Synology[0] NAS and use their Photos software with an additional backup to both rsync.net and BackBlaze, in addition to using Google Photos — which I'll happily pay for. (humor my redundancy: I'm extra paranoid about losing memories of my mother.) [0] https://www.synology.com

Why backblaze? /r/datahoarder also recommends them, but I couldn't find a reason.

They are very reliable and have a very reasonable price which is hard to find these days.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#38

Post by iamthepieman »

vishnumohandas wrote: post #27

Hey, over the last year we've been building ente[1], an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos. 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 feedbac…

180,000 photos seems tiny. I have about 20k photos just on my own, my wife probably has more. 180k is like 10-50 people. Not saying you can't handle it but 180k doesnt signal "I've got scaling all figured out" to me.
Post reply on HN