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Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

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Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#201

Post by kingosticks »

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 really didn't have much luck with the de-duplication. I tried photostructure for about 3 weeks and since stopped. I was trying to pull photos from multiple different drives/folders into one central organised place. A few issues:

  - The de-duplication didn't seem to work, it at least was defeated by my messy files. I spent many hours manually going through the results and finding many dupes. Then I lost interest in doing that and gave up.
Edit: I've just realised, was this (by design) simply copying each photo into the merged tree but then if I browse using the photostructure app it will hide the dupes? Can I prevent it making a copy? I want to use other file/photo browsers also.

  - can't use datestamp info in the filename?

  - very, very slow to sync from my external USB 3 drive. I'd be happy with that if the de-duplication worked. Also the status about what it's doing seems sporadic and half the time appears to be doing nothing at all. Maybe my laptop is too slow? 
 
  - no map view
I did like the feed of random photos. I saw loads of great old snaps I'd forgotten about. Somewhat bizarrely, when I wanted to share them quickly with others I ended up taking a photo of the photo(s) with my smartphone and sharing that via WhatsApp. That's more my failing but it did seem a bit silly that I resorted to doing that.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#202

Post by justusthane »

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've been a paying customer of SmugMug for years and highly recommend them. I use it as a photography portfolio though, not as a Google Photos replacement (although it certainly can be used that was as well).

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#203

Post by TimPC »

gtirloni wrote: post #197
vishnumohandas wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wa…

The self-hosted audience is also very small. I think you made the right choice.

For photos I’d agree as most customers are end users. Don’t underestimate this for other products though. Self hosting is a huge feature for selling into large corporations with data security policies.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#204

Post by btdmaster »

wackget wrote: post #48

Is there a self-hosted solution which supports offline object recognition AND searchable OCR of text in images (e.g. so you can search through images of receipts/invoices)?

Nextcloud seems extensible enough for it to work[1][2].

[1] https://help.nextcloud.com/t/search-images-for-content-of-im...

[2] https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/ocr

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#205

Post by kayoone »

Superblazer wrote: post #169
kevml wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To assume that they don’t know “what they are getting into” is a bit patriarchal.

You think a random person who would never look or care about tech would understand the privacy issues? Absolutely not. All they'd know is what the companies say and advertise.

I don't agree, especially due to massive media coverage around these issues even my mom who knows nothing about tech is very hesitant to sign up with new services and existing ones changing policies and what not. Not everyone understands the privacy issues deeply, but they are at least aware and in many cases more careful than say 5 years ago.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#206

Post by WhyNotHugo »

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…

crypt.ee refuses to have a mobile app or allow third parties to do so, which is a hard dealbreaker if you use your phone to take photos.

It seems that the expect people to manually pick photos to upload one by one via their website and also figure out which ones you've already uploaded and not pick those again.

Basically the really hard part of syncing photos needs to be done manually.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#207

Post by pnutjam »

risyachka wrote: post #39
dkasper wrote: post #14

Why not just pay for google photos?

Is there any convenient way to back up Google Photos to Backblaze or S3?

There are afew projects on github that let you configure an API key for google access and pull your photos, without using takeout. https://github.com/dtylman/gitmoo-goog https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync

I run one on my wife's account with a cron job to grab new photos daily.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#208

Post by ale42 »

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…

created date 2008, whatsapp-picture-whatever-date might simply be a picture from 2008 that someone sent you over whatsapp on that specific date...

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#209

Post by WhyNotHugo »

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…

This looks pretty neat, I wonder how I've been missing it so far.

Do you have an public API? I'd love to have a tiny sync client to fetch photos and store them on my laptop.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#210

Post by Jabbles »

chomp wrote: post #56
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.

It is not, however for some of us, there was an implicit “I let you datamine my images, you host them” relationship. Having to pay google tips the scales, so why not spend your $2 on a more privacy oriented service?

What kind of datamining? I suppose we have no way of actually knowing if it's true, but Google does say they don't use Photos data for ads:

As always, we don’t sell your information to anyone, and we don’t use information in apps where you primarily store personal content—such as Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Photos—for advertising purposes, period.

https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/keeping-priva...

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