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Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

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Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#111

Post by egeozcan »

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".

It looks like they only open sourced the clients, not the backend.

Also the phrase "ente has an open architecture and source code that has been peer reviewed" that can be found on their website follows a dark pattern: hey, look we are open but not really.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#112

Post by speedgoose »

sverhagen wrote: post #95
vishnumohandas wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I am not them but I know a lot of people who are not motivated by money. I guess they need and want enough money to happily live and work in good conditions, but not more, and they do not seek to become the next Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#113

Post by CharlesW »

sverhagen wrote: post #95
vishnumohandas wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

To me, that’s a red flag for a service I don’t want to see disappear in a few years.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#114

Post by LeoPanthera »

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…

This is what I currently do, but it doesn't expose the output of the object recognition to me. You have to guess what objects it might be able to recognize, and then search for them. I'd rather have the raw data.

(It's also frustrating that the VoiceOver image recognition is far superior to Photos', but is inaccessible to the Photos app.)

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#115

Post by rxbudian »

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…

btw, If you have office 365 subscription, Onedrive has 1TB space to use

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#116

Post by Nadya »

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.

Extremely reliable and one of the most "no muss, no fuss." backups. I had a drive fail and was able to recover all of my files by having them ship me a drive with my data on it and I returned the drive for basically no expense of my own (I have several 4-5TB drives and had an old 2TB drive fail. All for $5/mo to know that I don't have to worry about backup of cold-storage files for as long as they're in business.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#117

Post by mceachen »

Vaslo wrote: post #102
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…

I have an unRaid server and I found your app to be the easiest to use, but I had to switch to photo prism because you don’t have an easy way to tell the difference between photos and videos. I know you previously responded that people should upvote that feature, but the inability to distinguish video from photo just seems like a must have fix over other potentially over engineered stuff that others are asking for.

(I just had a family member ask for this feature today in our family's PhotoStructure library: I'll get it into the next beta build which I hope to release in a day or two)

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#118

Post by isoprophlex »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #108

Some people here suggested Google Takeout for Photos. I did that and I now have a list of 298 separate downloads in my Gmail. Is there anyway, I can drop that to Dropbox (or another bigger cloud service) without me downloading it off-line and then uploading it? Dropbox; because I can set a folder to sync "Online Only" and figure out a way to deal with it.

IIRC you should be able to specify your google takeout download size, it can also create 50GB archives.

But no, as far as I understand you have to download and re-upload using a local machine...

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#119

Post by Tempest1981 »

mceachen wrote: post #99
Aeolun wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How do you compute the duplicates? Does it detect rotated dupes, and resolution differences?

I tried a few things with ImageMagick, but ran into problems. I'll have to try your app!

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#120

Post by pindab0ter »

ping_pong wrote: post #50

To be honest, $2/month isn't that unreasonable from a useful service. I would definitely class Google Photos as useful, especially its ability to search for pictures. I personally use iCloud, and back everything to a Synology.

What’s your setup for that? How do you sync (incoming) photos to an arbitrary place outside of the Photos library?
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