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Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

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Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#91

Post by sp332 »

vzaliva wrote: post #81
leetrout wrote: post #34

https://www.smugmug.com/ and https://www.flickr.com/ (Same parent company now). Chris MacAskill founded it with his son. Pretty solid company, seems like. https://mixergy.com/interviews/smugmug-chris-macaskill-inter...

I would never use or recommend Flickr. They lied to me. As premium user (for many yars) the promise to me was that photos uploaded will be kept free forever as long as the service exists. Even if I stop paying. Then they went back on that. They may have a very good reasons, but the trust was broken.

They were owned by Yahoo for a while. Has the management changed since the one that broke your trust?

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#92

Post by Aeolun »

exhilaration wrote: post #72
Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #62

For backing up photos, I've used two solutions: 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 appr…

Do you know if Photosync can retrieve full resolution photos from Google Photos? Every other tool out there can only get the lower-res version from the Google Photos API.

I think it does, but the method is paginated, so if you have several thousands of photos you have some scrolling to do.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#93

Post by sp332 »

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 cheap and they recently added an S3-like API, so lots of apps that let you point at an S3-bucket-like URL just work.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#94

Post by _fs »

sp332 wrote: post #87
choward wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't tell if this is self hosted or not. All I see is a centralized option. If not self hostable, a user still can't guarantee that this doesn't just end up being as bad as google photos. There are plenty of companies like this that provide an alternative to the mainstream then sell out. Really, the only person you can trust is yourself at the end of the day.

Down in the reddit comments it says it is not self-hosted because of limited "engineering bandwidth".

AKA we want to lock you in to our PAAS

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#95

Post by sverhagen »

vishnumohandas wrote: post #64
raybb wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your strategy to get enough users so that you become financially sustainable?

The current set of paid users are sufficient to break-even on the infrastructure costs. 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, pr…

> not motivated by money

Ummm, could you elaborate on this? It sounds great but it's at the same time so foreign to me...

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#96

Post by hoherd »

mceachen wrote: post #3

You're certainly welcome to try PhotoStructure! It's got very robust de-duplication, supports portable libraries (so you can automatically sweep your photos scattered across many drives and computers into a single timestamped folder structure), and a novel UI showing a random sampled view of your library. There's also an active forum for both support and to discuss what and how new features are built out. https://pho…

FYI I just went to look for videos on YT showing off PhotoStructure and was amazed to see exactly 0 hits for "photostructure"[1]. Seems like a big opportunity waiting.

- [1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22photostructu...>

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#97

Post by vanous »

Aeolun wrote: post #89
sp332 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Down in the reddit comments it says it is not self-hosted because of limited "engineering bandwidth".

That seems counterintuitive.

As long as the server is closed source, this remains in the 'nice but do not touch' territory.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#98

Post by code_duck »

The “free storage” was news to me when I heard they were ending it. Turns out this was only for images saved compressed (‘High’ vs Original quality). Since I don’t want my images altered at all I never used that option, and the change is not significant. I don’t recommend that you let Google apply lossy compression to your images to save space, either, unless your photos are not very important.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#99

Post by mceachen »

Aeolun wrote: post #90
mceachen wrote: post #3

You're certainly welcome to try PhotoStructure! It's got very robust de-duplication, supports portable libraries (so you can automatically sweep your photos scattered across many drives and computers into a single timestamped folder structure), and a novel UI showing a random sampled view of your library. There's also an active forum for both support and to discuss what and how new features are built out. https://pho…

Oh. Deduplication across all drives! Consider me interested. Will try this out later.

I had boxes and boxes of old drives that I wanted to get organized which drove that feature: https://photostructure.com/about/introducing-photostructure/...

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/ )

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#100

Post by mceachen »

hoherd wrote: post #96
mceachen wrote: post #3

You're certainly welcome to try PhotoStructure! It's got very robust de-duplication, supports portable libraries (so you can automatically sweep your photos scattered across many drives and computers into a single timestamped folder structure), and a novel UI showing a random sampled view of your library. There's also an active forum for both support and to discuss what and how new features are built out. https://pho…

FYI I just went to look for videos on YT showing off PhotoStructure and was amazed to see exactly 0 hits for "photostructure"[1]. Seems like a big opportunity waiting. - [1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22photostructu... >

Oof, yeah, I've got to sit down and record some screencasts. Thanks for the reminder.
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