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Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

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Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#181

Post by rakoo »

akkartik wrote: post #69

I'm in the market for this, albeit for different reasons. Perhaps coincidentally, right after Google announced ending their free storage their sync started acting up for me. Even though I'm a _paying_ customer. In that circumstance the usual Google lack of support becomes quite unacceptable. For me the key feature is partner sharing. My wife and I take lots of baby photos. We see each other's photos as if we took the…

If you're that close with someone, the best thing to do is to use syncthing to synchronise your Photos folder. Every photo you take ends in that folder, is synchronized to your partner's Photos folder, and they will see it as if they took it. Add another syncthing to your computer and you can comfortably browse your photos there. Reorganize in albums from your computer if you want, and you will see the albums on the phone.

All of this is just using the base syncthing and doesn't require any technical skills. Backing up in the cloud needs more time and expertise, but after having done it myself and realizing I don't actually need it (a simple backup is enough, I don't need a web interface to do what I can do faster and more easily from a desktop app) and I can have encrypted backups instead. Bonus: if you're both on the same wifi the sharing is quasi-instantaneous and doesn't waste energy sending to a faraway server first

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#182

Post by kilroy123 »

The problem I have with most of these self-hosted or new tools:

- It's soooooo slow if you are like me and have 50,000-100k+ pictures in all sorts of formats. (RAW, png, gif, jpg)

- There's a real lack of smart and "magical" ML tagging and searching.

- Some I've seen get very confused by the datetime. Like, yes the created date was 2008, but the name of the image is: 'whatsapp-picture-2020-05-22.jpg' or whatever, so obviously show it as a picture from 2020.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#183

Post by jarenmf »

kilroy123 wrote: post #182

The problem I have with most of these self-hosted or new tools: - It's soooooo slow if you are like me and have 50,000-100k+ pictures in all sorts of formats. (RAW, png, gif, jpg) - There's a real lack of smart and "magical" ML tagging and searching. - Some I've seen get very confused by the datetime. Like, yes the created date was 2008, but the name of the image is: 'whatsapp-picture-2020-05-22.jpg' or whatever, so…

Can Google photos (or other service) handle +50k images?

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#184

Post by qbonnard »

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…

linuxserver.io made an rdesktop-web based docker image of DigiKam[0], so I guess it could be "upgraded" to self-hosted. I'd be tempted by the potential of setting up various digikams as a service for my various users (the member of my family), where each instance could share some but not all photo folders with others.

[0] https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-digikam

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#186

Post by noja »

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…

Nextcloud is great, but not for photo galleries. The thumbnail generation is very unoptimised and it cannot handle folders with more than a small number of photos.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#187

Post by cachapa »

I'm a long time Google Photos user myself, and have always been disappointed by the lackluster sharing and organizational capabilities in GP -- Google threw AI at the problem and considered it solved.

We're working on a new app that solves those problems by adapting to how actual humans organize and share their memories. We're also making it offline-first (https://twitter.com/cachapa/status/1395321808400883712) and obviously, end-to-end encrypted.

There's more at https://storyark.de, and while you're at it sign up for our upcoming beta test too :-)

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#188

Post by kissgyorgy »

Nextcloud! I can't praise and recommend them enough! https://nextcloud.com/

You can self-host it, it's license is ASGI, so it's never going away, and it has an app for photos: https://github.com/nextcloud/photos

and another one where you can put all your photos on a map: https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/maps

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#189

Post by jannes »

lethologica wrote: post #127
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.

Is there perhaps some IFFFT solution for this?

Would you seriously give your entire photo library to another third party just to save some time?
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