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.
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.
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.
If you’re mostly using Apple phones and computers, why not use iCloud’s Photo Library?
Google Photos Transferring photos to another service such as Flickr & One Drive is now available.
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?
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