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Cheap alternatives to Google Photos?
dotcomUNDERGROUND
Member
in General
What are the cheap alternatives to Google Photos now?
I am basically looking forward to upload-and-remove photos from my phone like I do with google photos. At a cheaper cost.
Google photos features like uploading lower res photos, grouping by date, face recognition will be great.
Comments
$1.99/month for 50GB is still a great deal to me with search image with text, people, etc
You can always use a good php based script with these functions If you search for one and run it on your VPS or your hosting provider and have a local backup in case you need to move.
You do have the following options:
OneDrive by Microsoft
NextCloud
Owncloud
Seafile
Filecloud
Amazon photos is free if you have prime, has a similar phone app.
PhotoStructure is the best self-hosted option, but some features are only in the pro version. Payments for the pro version help the developer, who works on it full-time. It's not open-source, which isn't ideal but also isn't a deal breaker. Its deduplication is the best I've seen, as it can dedupe photos even if there's smaller versions with worse JPEG quality (a basic dedupe by hash won't find those).
AFAIK PhotoStructure doesn't have upload support yet. People usually handle uploads by using something like SyncThing to sync from their phone to the server, then PhotoStructure picks up the new files in the upload directory and imports them to the library.
PhotoPrism is decent. More mature than PhotoStructure, but not as polished or powerful. There's some features that only PhotoPrism has, but for the features that both have, PhotoStructure's version is generally more comprehensive and more polished.
If you want to self-host, try both and see which one you like?
You do need to set your expectations appropriately. Neither of them are quite as good as Google. Google have far far more compute resources available to them, and a large number of AI engineers, and as a result their machine learning / AI models are significantly more sophisticated. Google would have ML models that run on systems with several high-end GPUs and hundreds of GBs of RAM, which is way more complex than what some self-hosted Tensorflow model can do.
Even with other SaaS options like Amazon, Flickr, etc, they're not quite as good as Google Photos.
You won't get good face recognition, deduping, transcoding (for videos), fancy Instagram-like filters, etc with a PHP script. A PHP script can do a basic gallery, but it can't do anything like what Google Photos allows.
Amazon Photos is an ok alternative if you are already paying for Prime. If not, Google Photos is likely worth paying for and not that expensive compared to competitors, as there are not many comparable services to begin with.
No, you can't. Google Photos provides lots of complex functionality and a PHP gallery or photo management script is nothing like that.
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Google One is real cheap. 215 GB for US$2.99 /Month or US$29.99 prepay annually, .. is 200 GB but you get the first 15 GB Free!
If you want to self-host, Immich and photoview look very cool
Not a lot of options that are guaranteed reliable like Google Photos. Alternatives are probably setting up a vps (with nextcloud for example) from GreenCloudVPS or Serverica which in theory would give you 500GB of space instead of Google One's 200 GB for ~30 USD.
Google Workspace still comes with unlimited photos, right?
Hetzner Storage Share (Nextcloud) €3.9 per month
No - It counts towards the storage limit. That was changed at the same time as it was changed for the consumer version.
https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2020/11/changes-to-google-workspace-storage.html
There were some changes to the timeline, but the Google Photos date of June 1 was not changed.
Nextcloud is nowhere near Google Photos in terms of features. Its photo app is very basic.
I don't think Amazon Photos is available in all regions, however.
https://www.photo.gallery/
and
VPS
OneDrive?
I use onedrive.
Thanks for your suggestions!
But if I strip out the google's AI requirements and need just the upload-and-remove (remove uploaded photos from phone to free up space) feature, what will be the cheap alternatives storage price-wise?
How about Internxt?
What are those functionalities ?
Plus other features which I do not care about. Google Photos is a complete suite and other solution with a comparable quality and feature set does not currently exist.
I have been using it from a while. https://Internxt.com is good if you want clean interface and want to ditch those big tech prying on you all the time.
We have a bunch of photo apps on PikaPods to run for a few $$. See here: https://www.pikapods.com/apps#photo
Personally I like PhotoPrism (we already have a partnership with them) and FileRun for simpler cases. Photoview also looks promising, but isn't as mature yet. Pinry could make sense if the focus is on sharing.
Buy a 1st gen Google Pixel on eBay and upload everything via it
I use Nextcloud (for the PhoneSync) and https://photoprism.app/ selfhosted. Featurewise it's on par or even better than google photos:
. When I set it up there was no multi-user support, so if you need multiple users: track this issue to see when its done: https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism/issues/98
mobile app only for ios
you may check piwigo.org
Thank You for sharing these! Immich looks promising. Hopefully both will be supported for a long time.
Yandex Disk with app and auto upload - unlimited for pics and vids
has also WebDAV, rclone compatible and cheap separate 'private' storage
if you not shooting much faces why not
Nobody mentioned Mega.nz? They have an Android app that you can select what to sync to the drive.