Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#151

Post by non-nil » Mon, May 31, 2021, 7:32 AM UTC

CharlesW wrote: post #121

Brajeshwar wrote: post #82

I have been looking to get rid of Google Photos from my toolset for a different reason. I don't mind paying for valuable services. I have been on the 2TB Family plan of Google One for a while, as I thought I would use it as the backup for my Photos. The second reason was that I could have a single photo collective for the family. Apple Photos do not make it easy to have an all-shared family photo pool. Unfortunately,…

> Apple Photos do not make it easy to have an all-shared family photo pool. FWIW, this is trivial these days. We have a “Family Album” that everyone can see, search, add to, etc.

Shared albums contain (noticably) downsampled versions of the originals, see: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202786

I thought I could use shared albums to pool everyone's photos and use that pool to make backups, but that's not possible. Which isn't at all clear to people, in my experience.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#152

Post by vishnumohandas » Mon, May 31, 2021, 7:39 AM UTC

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".

Hey, maintaining and providing support for a server that is de-coupled from underlying external integrations (storage, payment, secrets, email, ...) is what requires bandwidth.

Also, self-hosted consumer products are hard to sustain profitably. Avenues for monetization are low.

Given that our long term target audience is people like my parents, we did not see enough value in investing in a self-hosted variant, and wanted to reduce the number of distractions.

This is not to say that we are against the idea of a self-hosted variant, just that it is not a priority for us right now.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#153

Post by pseingatl » Mon, May 31, 2021, 7:48 AM UTC

quyleanh wrote: post #68

You can take a look at this repo [1] Self-hosted - Photoprism [2] - Feature rich server-based application for browsing, organizing and sharing your personal photo collection. The most similar to Google Photos. - Photoview [3] - Photo gallery for self-hosted personal servers with Facial Recognition. - Photostructure [4] - Self-hosted photo library that makes browsing and sharing a lifetime of memories delightful. - Li…

Picasa?

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#154

Post by oliwarner » Mon, May 31, 2021, 7:51 AM UTC

There are clearly a lot of self-hosting options.

What frustrates me from moving away from Google Photos is the "last mile" integration into Android that would upload photos from my phone but more, allow me to select images from my greater library in Android's file and photo pickers.

Anyone know something that actually replaces that functionality on Android?

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#155

Post by fire » Mon, May 31, 2021, 7:53 AM UTC

orangepanda wrote: post #123

speedgoose wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right. But you need money to pay for infrastructure and employees. "not motivated by money" sounds very much like "we'll be shutting down in 2 years"

"Not motivated by money" in this context simply means not being profit focused, so breaking even and/or revenue enough to hire some more engineers is probably the monetary goal

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#156

Post by chronolitus » Mon, May 31, 2021, 8:00 AM UTC

oliwarner wrote: post #154

There are clearly a lot of self-hosting options. What frustrates me from moving away from Google Photos is the "last mile" integration into Android that would upload photos from my phone but more, allow me to select images from my greater library in Android's file and photo pickers. Anyone know something that actually replaces that functionality on Android?

In general, I can't believe there isn't a truly good sync app for android. I use Insync on the PC, and was disappointed to learn they used to have an android app which they discontinued. Currently I use DriveSync Pro to keep a few selected folders two-way-synced to my drive, which mostly works, but after a few weeks of leaving it alone, I open the app and most of the time it has been inactive for a few days.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#157

Post by plank_time » Mon, May 31, 2021, 8:04 AM UTC

pindab0ter wrote: post #120

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?

Synology has an iPhone app called DS Photo you can use to download pics directly to your NAS.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#158

Post by fletchowns » Mon, May 31, 2021, 8:14 AM UTC

chronolitus wrote: post #156

oliwarner wrote: post #154

There are clearly a lot of self-hosting options. What frustrates me from moving away from Google Photos is the "last mile" integration into Android that would upload photos from my phone but more, allow me to select images from my greater library in Android's file and photo pickers. Anyone know something that actually replaces that functionality on Android?

In general, I can't believe there isn't a truly good sync app for android. I use Insync on the PC, and was disappointed to learn they used to have an android app which they discontinued. Currently I use DriveSync Pro to keep a few selected folders two-way-synced to my drive, which mostly works, but after a few weeks of leaving it alone, I open the app and most of the time it has been inactive for a few days.

I use DriveSync Pro and I want to say I had this issue and had to fiddle with the Android app preferences to allow it to run in the background, I may be confusing it with another app issue though.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#159

Post by egeozcan » Mon, May 31, 2021, 8:15 AM UTC

vishnumohandas wrote: post #144

egeozcan wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hey, I'm sorry that it came across that way. Thanks for pointing it out, I now see the lack of clarity. I've updated the copy to better reflect the situation.

Great, thanks for the fast reaction!

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#160

Post by bgdam » Mon, May 31, 2021, 8:19 AM UTC

nindalf wrote: post #106

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…

As a user of ente, I can say I’m pretty happy. It doesn’t have all the features that Google has but they’ve made a promising start. If the search feature becomes comparable, I’d move off Google photos permanently.

Can the search feature of ente become comparable to Google Photos? AFAIK, ente does E2E encryption, which means that unless they index the EXIF data on each single device, and also run the image recognition algorithms on device, the search is never going to be comparable to Google Photos.