The way google will nag you when your storage is nearly full is ultra annoying, borderline dark pattern. It will warn you that you might be running out of storage when attaching small PDFs to an email and the like, when you still have hundreds of megabytes available.
I started using Immich just this week and am very impressed by the amount of features built-in and everything just works. It really is a full-on replacement for google photos which is amazing. Even advanced features like face-detection using AI and partner sharing are there.
Shout-out also to immich-go [1] which is a cli tool that allowed me to migrate hundred of gigabytes of photos from a google takeout backup flawlessly.
Hundreds of megabytes is not that much, people can fill that up easily without sending large emails. Gmail can't predict the sizes of the emails you'll receive in the future. Maybe all your attachments are small but you'll receive large emails. Warning you when you only have a dozen MB left could well be too late.
The main argument is privacy, both with Google as a whole as well as facial recognition and private moments being logged in Google photos.
One could argue that they are telling the truth about whether or not they ever look at your data and keep it encrypted and this and that and the other, but the simple fact is that unless it is open source or audited multiple times by independent third parties, there is no way to confirm that all of your data actually is private.
However, most people are beginning to realize that because of the overreach that all of these different tech mega corporations have, it is almost impossible to stay private, even if you do sacrifice your products for more private, generally less feature rich ones. A good example is proton mail: it is a great email service, it is truly private, but you also don't get a lot of the really nice features that Google has, like an actually good suite of integration with meetings, calendar appointments, shipping tracking, reminders, file sharing, the works.
There is a trade-off, and a lot of the tech focused people believe that the lack of features warrants the more privacy, so it is really a difference of ideology more than anything.
Imo, the main concern is that it's tied into your google account. That's a lot of eggs for one basket. What if some ML model has a bad day and bans your account? It's not terrifically likely to happen, but if it did, how much would you lose?
On the other hand, I trust google's ability to store my data more than some homebrewed app.
As usual, the best solution will vary, but will always include secure offsite backups.
This is one of my main concerns. I hope I’m somewhat more protected as I’ve been paying for google one for quite some years (so at least has some financial link to me also, and supposedly better support to go with it).
Recently the editing tools have gotten much better too. I have sometimes made photos look better(to my liking) on google photos android app than using a dedicated desktop software.
This part is actually pretty OK. Google takeout takes time but if you have the app set to upload originals that's what you get and you can download it any time you want, so if they make a drastic change you'd still have all the old photos.
The key phrase that I don't trust is "download it any time you want". I wouldn't trust Google Takeout to work for a banned account, and I feel like accounts can get banned for arbitrary reasons and there is no mitigation for a false ban.
i use google photos for quick text based search, like me with clock tower or something. google photos can't maintain folder structure, so its always my 2nd backup. first one is miror in dropbox.
Yeah, a big fear of mine is having ten years worth of photos deleted in one fell swoop (or, at least, access to them removed without recourse, which comes to the same thing) because an AI thinks that a half-nude photo of my three-year-old is CSAM.
Of course, what that actually means in practice is that I should just regularly archive.
I think making sure to have a backup of your important content is always necessary. Being able yo conventiently port to another service, less so. I'm less concerend about the real risks of me flagged as some deviant, as long as I can pick up my data and give two fingers to the company that behaves in an unreasonably poor manner, im good.
realistically, our wifes and family will almost never make backups, and probably most of us hackers either, it ll stay on todo or as implemented but now broken script.
I'll share my Immich setup in case it helps someone.
I looked a while for a server that had a lot of storage space. I ended up finding: https://contabo.com/en/storage-vps/, $5.5 for 400GB.
To take care of all setup and maintenance complexity I installed cloudron.io
and then installed the Immich app.
Only issue is sometimes running out of ram.
Sounds tempting, but every time I try something like this, the momentum runs out after a few months to a year, and I'm left with a decaying side-project consuming more of my time and energy.
Is there a reasonably priced alternative to Google Photos that comes with fault tolerance, privacy, and a functional, cross-platform interface?
The problem with a lot of these applications is deployment and backup.
A list of components users should care about.
1. Deployment with egress or lan only
2. Simple back up and restore of applications version/app data.
3. Fault tolerant system like ZFS
4. Making sure the app data is viewable/accessible independent of the app itself.
There's not a single open source system that abstracts the complexity to achieve those 4 points. In fact there are not many paid products that achieve those goals. Most I've seen are subscription based.
Many might say go native docker/kubernetes. I would argue those technologies are fine but too high of a learning curve and fundamentally don't have a solution for a simple GUI driven backup / restore.
Synology is .. ok. They have working photo app and meh albums. But they keep pushing to make an account and log in into the cloud (since about 2 years I think), so their trajectory is not great.
I think points you rise are not that hard to solve with OS stack, to me the difficult part is the ease of sharing photos with others. People like familiar interfaces, adding photos to their own albums etc. Their experience of viewing your photos will never be that great, even when you have a decent uplink.
Immich is just awesome...
Works on iOS, Android in with some tweaks for external non smartphone photo libraries. All the features I needed, even multiple user accounts with sharing everything with your husband/wife or creating shared albums for sharing with other people. And its FOSS!
I like the "Archive" feature to hide photos very much. The only thing that I am missing is a specific implementation of tags. If you would like to read about it, see my comment[1] on the discussion about tags feature.
Howdy, I'm the author: have you tried the latest alpha build? (My personal library is 500k assets, so 134k should be fine, especially if the library db is on SSD).
What I get from Google Photos is that, regardless of bad luck or incompetence on my part, someone else takes care of backing up a copy (at reduced quality) of all my photos no matter when I take them, and does so for €0 additional spend or effort on my part. That proposition is tough to beat.
I really miss PhotoLife and Everpix. The concepts were great (ingest all your photos from phone/upload/FB/etc) and the price was good (too good as it turned out). I have my PhotoLife archive on SmugMug after they somehow took over but SmugMug isn't great.
I'm fine self-hosting but I would really like the software in question to handle backups by itself. Sonarr/Radarr/etc all have an amazing backup/restore system that I have found really solid. Obviously Immich's DB is bigger and I do stop all my dockers and backup their config folder nightly so I have that as a backup but still.
Lastly I would love some kind of persist/backup to S3 (or R2?) option. Doubly so for the DB. If my house burns down I'd want to be able to get back up and running easily.
The one thing that stops me from using something other than Google Photos is that I use GPhotos for sharing with others, and I don't want people to have to sign up for a new account just to join albums, and I don't want them to have to install a new app in order to add photos to shared albums. I just don't think that's going to happen.
Looks like Immich supports OAuth, so presumably people could sign into my instance with their Google Account credentials. But then does the mobile app start using my instance to upload their photos, even if it's unrelated to an album I've shared with them? Kinda confused how this is supposed to work.
Immich allows you to create a shareable link for an album which other people can use to view and optionally upload photos, without a login required. I've only used this particular feature on the web so I don't know how or even whether it works on the app though.
I want Picasa (https://picasa.google.com/) to be the Google Photos replacement. Picasa was awesome. A desktop app, super responsive, able to scroll through hundreds or thousands of photos without effort. It didn't require no damn internet connection. It could sync to PicasaWeb, but it wasn't required. It also did not require a cloud account that could be terminated with no warning or appeal.
Does anyone know of any photo management projects that include integration with recent ML models for classification and captioning?
It'd be awesome to have a system that could automatically generate (model versioned) CLIP or SAM embeddings as metadata for your whole library, for downstream plugins to work with (for deduplication, facial recognition, semantic search, text search, etc.)
PhotoPrism[0] does facial recognition and semantic search ("Your pictures are automatically classified based on their content and location. Many more image properties like colors, chroma, and quality can be searched as well.") Duplicate detection only finds exact matches.
I'm the author of PhotoStructure (which is still a web-based UI, like Immich), but has a strict requirement of not being the "system of record" for any metadata.
I built a prototype for a "curator" plugin API, but complexity kept me from releasing it. Here's the short list of "complexifiers":
1. Hourly/daily rate limits (say, from external API calls)
2. How long to cache results for a given input (say, when a new model is available)
4. How to effectively use those results (face grouping requires an ANN to handle the high-dimension vector embedding, whisper/OCR requires a fulltext index, ...)
It's 4. that's the real doozy at least in my mind. It might just be the case that there are only a handful of archetypes, but daily customer support and getting the Next Build out the door has put this task on the back burner for now.
(If anyone has seen this done nicely in other systems, I'm all ears!)
I am looking for something better than nextcloud for images in particular, but whatever i choose must integrate with nextcloud. i don't want two backup services, i just need a better interface/app/enrichment.
What it would be interesting is a photo service back-end that can completely run with encrypted files in the server, like iCloud with Advance Data Protection.
All the processing is done on-device (phone) and the server is just for distribution
If you don't want to use any of the machine learning features i.e. CLIP contextual search, facial recognition, and clustering, you can disable them and run on a Pi. Normal operations are very light on load, the hardware requirement is for Machine Learning related tasks, which makes sense I think
