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Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos

by xenator on 5/12/24, 10:33 AM with 18 comments

I have a real problem. For many years I had Google Photos. It was advertised as free forever, and I uploaded all my old archives from hard drive to cloud service. I never overused it, but global enshittification of Google poisoned this service also at some point. I partially agree with this move, even if I already pay Google for Youtube and watch advertisement I decided to pay for the storage and subscribed to Google One.

About month ago, Google somehow scammed me to switch plan with their unfamous woke AI. I thought they would try to lure me to taste Gemini and if it is ok then I will decide to switch from ChatGPT or other services I pay. But as soon as I switched, I found that now the price for Google One is 10-12 times more with storage I don't need. I barely use 1 Tb with 15 years of contents. Shame on me I trusted Google again with my personal data.

So, now I have time until July 31, 2024 to transfer all my photos and data to somewhere else. Because Google One doesn't provide any options to switch back to my old 2 Tb plan. Funny part that I paid for my 2 Tb plan upfront for one year and spend about just half of this period.

What do you recommend as an alternative to Google Photos and how can I save my data? I remember that they use internal format to store images and once they ask me to switch to this format to save data. Did you recover from this move and were able to restore all your family photos?

I need something reliable with phone backup application. Preferably with a family plan. We mostly use Apple phones and computers with my wife and kids.

  • by vishnumohandas on 5/12/24, 12:14 PM

    Hey, we're building Ente[1] as an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos.

    If it helps, Ente has been previously discussed on HN[2][3].

    To answer your questions, we support imports from Google Takeout[4], and we stitch together metadata from their sidecar files to make your library whole.

    We also support Family Plans[5] and have open source apps[6] for every platform.

    Let me know if you have more questions, would be happy to help!

    [1]: https://ente.io

    [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39570692

    [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28347439

    [4]: https://help.ente.io/photos/migration/from-google-photos/

    [5]: https://help.ente.io/photos/features/family-plans

    [6]: https://github.com/ente-io/ente

  • by evnix on 5/13/24, 10:02 AM

    Sticking to Google photos because I can search for my driving license just by searching 'license' or first 2-3 digits of my license number and it does it for me or search through photo captures of bills and documents by just entering partial Ids or any text the document might have like 'tax 2023'.

    I think its OCR and image search is what keeping me hostage there.

  • by reify on 5/12/24, 12:15 PM

    Personally I store everything personal offline.

    Much Safer.

    I have 2 x 2TB drives.

    Formatted to Exfat (I am a linux user, they are not.) so my family can get access when I die.

    If you are in Europe:

    Kdrive

    https://www.infomaniak.com/en/kdrive

    15GB free storage for photos, etc

    2Tb storage = monthly CHF5.54 or $5.52 or £4.40

    The swiss know how to do it properly.

  • by petabyt on 5/13/24, 1:51 AM

    I setup Immich in a few minutes with an old PC running FreeNAS: https://immich.app/

    Their Android/iOS Flutter app needs some polishing, but overall it's very usable and very similar to Google Photos.

  • by al_borland on 5/12/24, 4:00 PM

    If you’re mostly using Apple phones and computers, why not use iCloud’s Photo Library?

  • by BMc2020 on 5/12/24, 11:41 AM

    https://takeout.google.com/

    Google Photos Transferring photos to another service such as Flickr & One Drive is now available.

  • by hnthrowaway0328 on 5/12/24, 11:29 AM

    I'm thinking about the same thing. Maybe I can make a native application that sync photos between the phone, the PC and a cloud bucket? And put up some code to display the photos.

    Doesn't sound too hard?