What are you using as a Google photos alternative? Currently I’m using Nextcloud but I’m thinking of switching to a more dedicated solution.
I mainly need to upload photos from my device automatically, have an UI to see and classify them, albuns and sharing.
I will get downvoted for this but a Synology Nas is simple and does 90% of what google will do. They also have their own DDNS or you can use whatever you like.
Downside is tou have to buy their hardware. Unless you do the Xpenology route.
Been using a Synology NAS for the past year for automatic photo backups. Take a photo, it gets copied to my drive at home so long as there’s internet access available. No issues so far. Turned off my backups to Google.
What happens when your Synology fails? Do you have offsite backup to Backblaze or something similar?
This is my setup using the 3, 2, 1 rule:
3: Raid 5 setup with 2 unused drives and setup to automatically spool up and recover if one of the drives starts failing. 2: off-site at the father in laws house (using a Xpenology super tiny PC and an external drive) 1: Monthly Backblaze
While there is risk, it’s def safer if not safer than Google drive.
Not who you’re replying to but yes, Synology will let you automate backups to a cloud/service (and you definitely should!)
It’s a dual drive redundant setup. Unless something catastrophic happens, I doubt both drives will go out at the same time. I could do an offsite backup as well, but just haven’t.
The number of redundant drives actually doesn’t make much difference, but it does “help”. Instead of picturing individual drive failures, picture a house fire.
Also picture the next step after one of the drives fails – you’ll be copying all of that data off of your 1 good drive, putting a lot of stress on it. That drive is likely from the same batch, same age, etc. as the failed drive. The likelihood of your good drive failing during the recovery process is higher than one might like.
I was very satisfied with their pricing for offsite backups, and the ease of setup. Definitely worth a look.
RAID is not backup :) And yes, it happened to me for 4 drives in a 16 drive system to fail in the span of just a few days (same batch).
What happens when your Synology fails?
I can’t speak for other users, but my Synology setup looks like this:
- NAS - 1 drive redundancy via hybrid RAID.
- Important folders have recycling bins enabled and I have versioning, too.
- Daily backup to a local external drive.
- Daily, encrypted backup to the cloud.
- Monthly, off-site HDD backup.
This is honestly a much more secure way of storing my photos than Google Photos.
I have a Synology NAS, and while their Synology Photos is really good, it’s no match for Google Photos. It’s not their fault though, any self-hosted solution is going to be harder to share photos and do collaborative albums and such. And Google Photos image and face recognition is just not matched. I backup my entire photo library to Synology Photos but most of them are also in Google Photos for ease of access and sharing.
Google definitely has better face recognition. You can pick up a QNAP and put a Google coral and essentially do the same thing.
I also run a 3rd party software that does the tagging. But it’s annoying to do each time.
My need for online photo galleries is just to direct friends and family to see them, I don’t store photos in the cloud.
I used to put up my photos on deviantart, I have had a gallery there for almost two decades, but lately dA has become very slow to navigate, so I built my own site, I didn’t need much, an index page linking to HTML galleries I export from digiKam.
After a few weeks of learning, designing and testing HTML and CSS, I have a nice index page that is responsive and easy to update and customize (in limited capacity).
This runs on a normal webhost, and is lightning quick to navigate, the galleries support browsing with the arrow keys, and just works.
There are three annoying things about it though…
-
To update a gallery, I need to recreate it in digiKam and upload it manually to the host.
-
I can’t include notes with the photos.
-
I have to edit a link in every gallery to make it be able to go back to the index page and not 404…
-
I’m surprised no one has mentioned Piwigo yet.
Photostructure is a strong starter, but development is slow and it’s still missing important features like sharing. Also, it’s not ooen source.
Immich seems great but doesn’t (yet) support digikam tags ( and since my 100,000 assets are tagged/organized via digikam, I don’t want to move to immich yet and have to start over).
PhotoPrism seemed pretty good, though it also doesn’t (yet) support digikam tags. Also, their self-hosted version doesn’t have all the features of their paid versions.
I have just tried it out for a quite limited time, but ente also looks great.
immich is the way to go
I’m kind of disappointed by the lack of encryption. It sounds great, but I don’t want to trust the server.
Where do you want the encryption? Data at rest? Or data in transit? Also, you have to host your own server. Would you not have trust on your own server ?
I want all data to be encrypted before it even reaches the server. Yes, I don’t want to trust even my own server for my image backups :), particularly since I would want to use something like Immich to provide photo backups for friends and family and I don’t even want to technically have access to their unencrypted photos unless they explicitly share them. I kind of want the attack surface for my photos to be as small as practical too. It’s almost certainly worse to have them available on my device unencrypted than a dedicated server, but it’s worse to have them unencrypted on both (and I want photos available on device so, thems the breaks).
I get that a lot of people won’t care about this and that they’d rather be able to run the image recognition features of Immich on the server and stuff, but I don’t think it’s entirely unreasonable to want encryption for this. If nothing else I’d love to be able to back up photos for friends and family and legitimately be able to tell them that it’s encrypted and I can’t see any of it. It’d be even sweeter if they could do image recognition on device and sync that metadata (encrypted) to the server as well.
I mean, you could still tell them their photos are encrypted 😉😉
(JK I wouldn’t)
Oh I get your point. Coming from family and friends POV, I agree that the server administrator should not be able to open the photos.
Yeah, that’s my main concern. I believe the Immich developers have said they have no desire to implement it, though… Which is fair enough, it doesn’t work for my desired use case though.
I have my own NAS with its native app and sync my phone directly to it.
Not self hosted but Ente photos works perfectly for me. Paid but cheap.
I recently adopted ente, and while the devs are active and enthusiastic, feature parity with gphotos is a long way off. IMO, the sub price should be half what it is.
The desktop app (the only practical/supported way to import your Google Takeout) has lots of little bugs and problems, not least of which is 100% CPU load for the the first few weeks you have it installed. Thats because (even after initial encryption and upload is complete) the machine learning and indexing (even the basic, opted out version) hobbles your system with aggressive CPU scheduling.
I’m going to stick it out for a second month, but I’m not without regrets. For me, I was just done feeding Google AI with my photos and wanted privacy first.
If you already run NextCloud, then NextCloud Memories (not photos) is very good.
I only just realized Memories existed, and man do I wish I knew about it when I started.
Memories allows you to view a timeline, improves loads using generated thumbnails, sorts by location, and even does facial recognition with the Recognize app installed. 1000x improvement over default photos app.
+1 for Immich. It’s the most complete and competent Google Photos replacement yet.
Proton Drive just recently came out with their photos feature, but it’s still a relatively new product.
I’m trying it out since I just upgraded to proton unlimited.
It’s pretty barebones. It has automatic uploads but only from the camera folder. It does have the ability to share links, but no folder or album support for sharing. No face tagging or object recognition that Google does
You can specify different folders for it to sync from, but yeah it’s pretty bare bones right now.
It’s buried in the settings, but you are right. Thanks for the tip!
If they could just add album sharing and maybe face/object tagging it would be pretty solid imo
If you need a UI to have albums and share them then yes, the previously mentioned Immich. I host it as well, and it is truly awesome.
One caveat though: it is still pretty early in development, there might be breaking changes. For example a few weeks ago you needed to update the docker compose file because they changed dependencies.
a few weeks ago you needed to update the docker compose file because they changed dependencies.
You are right, but they warned us about that few releases before in the mobile app and on the web. They reduced the number of containers again woop 🎇
100% this. I recommend also setting up SyncThing to keep a completely separate backup of your photos (if you have the means). They even state that on their GH repo that, due to the highly active development, you shouldn’t rely on Immich as the sole solution to backup photos and videos.
Ohh, I havent thought about backing it up with Syncthing! Thank you!
Synology Photos. I’ve heard Immich is quite good too.
deleted by creator
