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.

@corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
link
fedilink
English
61Y

Apparently Lemmy needs a better faq search.

@Rolando@lemmy.world
link
fedilink
English
111Y

Not OP, but FWIW I didn’t realize until reading your comment that the “awesome-selfhosted software” under Resources was actually an FAQ/List. I thought it was a repo of maybe just a couple relevant apps.

I know that doesn’t make a lot of sense now that I think about it, but I think it’s easy to miss.

@jaschen@lemmynsfw.com
link
fedilink
English
141Y

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.

EchoCranium
link
fedilink
English
31Y

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.

walden
link
fedilink
English
11Y

What happens when your Synology fails? Do you have offsite backup to Backblaze or something similar?

@Dlayknee@lemmy.world
link
fedilink
English
11Y

Not who you’re replying to but yes, Synology will let you automate backups to a cloud/service (and you definitely should!)

EchoCranium
link
fedilink
English
11Y

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.

@beerclue@lemmy.world
link
fedilink
English
21Y

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).

@DrinkMonkey@lemmy.ca
link
fedilink
English
31Y

I was very satisfied with their pricing for offsite backups, and the ease of setup. Definitely worth a look.

walden
link
fedilink
English
31Y

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.

@Showroom7561@lemmy.ca
link
fedilink
English
31Y

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.

@jaschen@lemmynsfw.com
link
fedilink
English
31Y

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.

@akilou@sh.itjust.works
link
fedilink
English
11Y

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.

@jaschen@lemmynsfw.com
link
fedilink
English
11Y

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.

@paf@jlai.lu
link
fedilink
English
21Y

I’m surprised no one has mentioned Piwigo yet.

@Showroom7561@lemmy.ca
link
fedilink
English
-11Y

Synology Photos has been a great alternative, not only to back up my photos/videos to my nas, but as an easy to way to search/organize/share them.

But for the absolute best subject recognition, tagging and search, I purchased Excire Foto (local AI, local database, etc.).

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.

@stoy@lemmy.zip
link
fedilink
English
41Y

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…

  1. To update a gallery, I need to recreate it in digiKam and upload it manually to the host.

  2. I can’t include notes with the photos.

  3. I have to edit a link in every gallery to make it be able to go back to the index page and not 404…

antsu
link
fedilink
English
201Y

+1 for Immich. It’s the most complete and competent Google Photos replacement yet.

@Discover5164@lemm.ee
link
fedilink
English
311Y

immich is the way to go

@Chobbes@lemmy.world
link
fedilink
English
11Y

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 ?

@Chobbes@lemmy.world
link
fedilink
English
8
edit-2
1Y

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.

@jrubal1462@mander.xyz
link
fedilink
English
21Y

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.

@Chobbes@lemmy.world
link
fedilink
English
21Y

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.

CaptainBlagbird
link
fedilink
English
51Y

I’m using Autosync on Android for backing up my stuff, but have no gallery service on my NAS yet. I’m thinking about Piwigo, can anyone share some thoughts on it?

@kia@lemmy.ca
link
fedilink
English
71Y

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

@kia@lemmy.ca
link
fedilink
English
210M

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

@kvadd@lemmy.world
link
fedilink
English
11Y

Does that include videos?

@kia@lemmy.ca
link
fedilink
English
21Y

Yes

@Zeroxxx@lemmy.id
link
fedilink
English
11Y

I have my own NAS with its native app and sync my phone directly to it.

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.

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!

@rambos@lemm.ee
link
fedilink
English
31Y

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 🎇

@barcaxavi@lemmy.world
link
fedilink
English
21Y

I have just tried it out for a quite limited time, but ente also looks great.

@bdonvr@thelemmy.club
link
fedilink
English
42
edit-2
1Y

I set up Immich a week or so back. It’s been a dream so far. The object recognition is really way better than expected. The App works really well.

I used this script to import my Google Photos dump. https://github.com/simulot/immich-go

I can’t say I used every possible feature of Google Photos but I haven’t missed anything yet!

RxBrad
link
fedilink
English
71Y

deleted by creator

It’s been added recently, in the form of External Libraries.

External libraries do this, but fwiw when I tested Immich I ended up with a ton of missing thumbnails in my external library and there seemed to be no way to detect and repair them. That was a deal breaker for me and I went back to Photoprism. Immich looks really great though other than that.

@dracs@programming.dev
link
fedilink
English
61Y

Set Immich up a couple weeks ago and I’m surprised how good it is. Their docs included a simple cli tool to bulk import all my Google photos. Mobile app is working great. I’m really impressed with the search too.

@sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf
link
fedilink
English
21Y

Gonna set up Immich soon!

Create a post

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don’t control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we’re here to support and learn from one another. Insults won’t be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it’s not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don’t duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

  • 1 user online
  • 239 users / day
  • 638 users / week
  • 1.41K users / month
  • 3.93K users / 6 months
  • 1 subscriber
  • 3.78K Posts
  • 76.6K Comments
  • Modlog