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Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

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Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#241

Post by Ashanmaril »

code_duck wrote: post #98

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.

The earlier Google Pixel phones included free unlimited original quality backup of photos/videos, but in recent phone generations they dropped that, and they also confirmed future Pixel phones won't even get free unlimited compressed backups.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#242

Post by croon »

Jabbles wrote: post #240
dolmen wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. As always with privacy policies, the information is in what is NOT said. 1. They don't sell to anyone. But what giving away for free? 2. They don't use personal content for advertising purposes. But what about…

1 seems unlikely to me - why would Google do that? It would always be in exchange for something, which is pretty much selling. 2 seems more plausible.

1) I trust them when they say they don't sell it, technically.

However they probably do sell information/meta data they themselves have mined from my data, which they probably claim is harmless and de-personalized.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#243

Post by tealpod »

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…

Product looks simple and promising as a good alternative to google photos.

Feedback: You can improve your website looks.

Goodluck

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#244

Post by 0xdky »

vishnumohandas wrote: post #44
iamthepieman wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

180,000 photos seems tiny. I have about 20k photos just on my own, my wife probably has more. 180k is like 10-50 people. Not saying you can't handle it but 180k doesnt signal "I've got scaling all figured out" to me.

More than scale, it was trust and reliability that I wanted to show. Of these, I feel that scale is the simpler problem to solve.

Especially with a stateless service like a photo hosting service, this is very true.

Wish you all the best!

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#245

Post by mceachen »

kingosticks wrote: post #201
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 d…

> if I browse using the PhotoStructure app it will guide the dupes

Yes: out of an abundance of caution, the unique (by SHA) variations of each asset are copied into your library. There are heuristics that pick which is the "best," and although those heuristics seem to be robust for most beta users, I didn't want to be the source of want data loss.

> datestamp info in the filename?

The metadata in the file is trusted more than any date extracted either from the filename or the directory hierarchy. Details are here: https://photostructure.com/faq/captured-at/

If you use the info tool, it'll tell you how it's extracting the date from any given file: https://photostructure.com/server/tools/#file-information

> slow to sync

PhotoStructure scales imports to accommodate current hardware, in Ann effort to keep the system responsive. Parallelism is limited by available RAM and CPU count. If you think it was being too conservative, please send me a screen shot of your about page (it includes both system metrics and what is thinking for scheduling limits), and if you want, debug logs, and we can look into what's going on. https://photostructure.com/faq/error-reports/#how-to-manuall...

> no map view

This is a popular feature request that I'm looking forward to building: https://forum.photostructure.com/t/support-reverse-geocoding...

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#246

Post by thorin1 »

umvi wrote: post #58

OneDrive. If you can get 5 other people to go in on a family plan with you, it's $17/year for 1TB storage. You can get OneDrive app for your phones and tablets to auto sync camera roll, etc. to OneDrive. As an added bonus, OneDrive is really well integrated with Windows 10 (if you are a windows user) so your pictures will just magically show up on your system as files you can drag and drop.

And if you know somebody from Microsoft, they can give you an employee discount. With the discount it's around 3 USD per person per year for 1TB storage each.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#249

Post by vishnumohandas »

tealpod wrote: post #243
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…

Product looks simple and promising as a good alternative to google photos. Feedback: You can improve your website looks. Goodluck

Thank you!

Regarding the website, I would be grateful if you could point out the worst part(s). I would love to improve.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#250

Post by rubyfan »

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…

What is the design target for this service? Is it the technophile who is trying to degoogle, is it some other specific design target or perhaps more general audience?

If it’s degooglers then perhaps convincing us it has everything Google Photos had is job number 1. If it’s missing feature X then you’ve got a reason to say no, if it’s at parity then it comes down to whether we trust YOU and is the deal good enough.

You’ve already convinced us you’re not Google so there is some things implied but you need to lean into it. Privacy, not having you information used for ad targeting, never sharing our photos or information derived with third parties - those are all thing to highlight (be the anti-Google).

I think you need some other killer feature or appeal that makes you different than iCloud here since Apple are already the anti-Google. I think you can also get 2TB of iCloud Photo storage for $10 a month so you gotta hit that if you want to charge $15 for 500GB.

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