Photos

Even iPhone users love Google Photos because Apple has nothing comparable. And it’s not just Apple either. The concept of unlimited and automatic free backups at original quality is unprecedented. Remember back when Facebook let you backup your photos to their servers for free? They were compressing them. They also built a facial recognition empire using them but that’s neither here nor there.

But with how low storage costs have gotten, it’s cheaper than ever to host your own photo backup service. A terabyte or two would probably last you many years of backup, unless you’re a photographer or editor.

Cloud

Stingle

Stingle is an affordable E2EE photo backup solution. It supports video files and automatic backups, but that’s about it. Stingle doesn’t seem to care about features. Instead, it’s hyper-focused on privacy and security. Their encryption algorithm is so optimized that there’s no lag when browsing photos.

Their plans are competitively priced and come with ample storage, but they are self-hostable too if you prefer that route.

Cryptee

Cryptee has gone beyond zero-knowledge E2EE. It protects anonymity by not requiring an email address or any personal information. Furthermore, you can hide certain folders even if you’re forced to provide access. They call that deniability.

Cryptee also supports documents, making it a privacy-friendly Google Docs alternative as well. The documents are also protected by same encryption.

The biggest downside is that they don’t support sharing of photos and documents. The focus here is very clearly privacy.

Ente

Ente is the most polished open-source option on this list. It’s very good looking, affordable, on every OS, and E2EE.

And if all that isn’t good enough for you, you can always self-host it. Honestly, unless you’re a security expert, your photos are probably safer with them.

As for features, they include the usual. Background uploads, hidden photos, smart search. But it gets better. Advanced sharing features include expiring links and family/partner libraries and collaborative albums. Memories, and multi-factor authentication are here too.

Piwigo

Piwigo has taken a rather unique spin on Google Photos by deciding to focus on the sharing aspect. It comes with a host of themes and plugins that allow you to present your photos in a fully-fledged website. The themes are essentially webpage templates that change the look of your gallery. Extensions hook into your favorite photo editing apps to upload photos directly.

Their cloud service is a bit low on storage, but it’s pretty affordable even if you pay for extra GBs. Of course you can always just opt for self-hosting.

Piwigo is a great open-source option for people, families, and organizations. It lets you showcase your photos beautifully without a lot of technical skill or time investment.

Yogile

Self-hosted

Immich

Immich is the perfect Google Photos clone. It looks and behaves exactly like the original, both the web version and the Android app. That’s automatic backup, facial recognition, duplicate removal, and even user management. Metadata is also supported with geotags as well as raw formats. There’s also a map view to showcase those geotags, and an Android app.

Unlike most solutions on this list (and what the name would imply), Immich also supports videos. The de-duplication and facial recognition can use an external server for machine learning. You can choose the compression level or maintain the original quality.

All this heavy lifting doesn’t come cheap. It requires no less than 2 CPU cores and 4GB of RAM, with the recommendation being double that. And that’s not even getting into the obvious storage requirements. High quality thumbnails and transcoded video take up a considerable amount of space. Hardware transcoding is also supported, benefitting from dedicated GPUs.

The fact that it’s even possible to run something like this on a home server is very impressive. It goes to show how the speed at which technology advances. It’s quite easy now to repurpose an old computer to be your own personal version of Google Photos.

Nextcloud

I’ve covered Nextcloud on many of my lists now, and that’s because it’s a jack of all trades. It lets you automatically backup photos from your phone to your Nextcloud server. Since Nextcloud uses WebDAV, you can use it with any gallery app that supports WebDAV backup, like PhotoSync. There are also apps made specifically for Nextcloud like LesPas and Memories.

Lomorage

Lomorage is a passion project by three fathers. It can run on anything from Windows to Raspberry Pi. A web portal is available, as well as Android and iOS apps that backup your photos. It’s rather straight forward to set up and requires little maintenance. It autoupdates and cleans up after itself. It supports redundancy, mirroring your photos to several locations.

They aimed not only for user-friendliness but also openness. Lomorage does not use any proprietary algorithms to lock you out of your files. You can remove its hard drive and plug it into another system and your files will be right there. You can also create different groups to share photos and albums with.

It’s got quite a few nifty features that Google Photos lacks. For one, you can have it turn your TV into a digital photo frame. You can also restrict it to your home’s local network, for more security. Of course this affects your ability to share, but it makes your photos much harder to hack.

PhotoPrism

If you’re more into organizational features, check out PhotoPrism. It offers different ways to organize your photos and videos, manually and automatically. The default is by date, using EXIF data, or by places. You’ve also got albums, favorites, moments and labels. You can mark files as hidden to make them disappear from the regular views. My favorite is the autoclassification feature. It uses machine learning to categorize your pictures by what’s in them. All from the safety of your own server. Who said you had to give up your privacy to experience the latest tech?

A few third-party apps support PhotoPrism, like PhotoSync, Gallery, and Photo Map.

OwnLibrePhotos

OwnLibrePhotos is a more traditional approach at a photo library. On first look, it’s very cozy and unassuming. Pop open the hood though and you’ll see some AI horsepower. It supports favorites, hidden photos, public vs private albums, and places. What sets LibrePhotos apart are the facial recognition and scene detection.

You give it a name to each face and it will group all photos that person is in. OwnLibrePhotos also creates albums for you based on different events or locations. They even include a comparison chart against Google Photos and other self-hosted solutions. That’s how you know they’re confident.

Their official mobile app supports both Android and iOS, but it’s not ready for primetime. Instead, they endorse a third-party Android app called Uhuru.

Lychee

Lychee is a minimalist photo management solution with a sleek modern UI. It doesn’t contain any crazy impressive features, just the basics. Upload, organize, and share. And it looks real good doing it. There are no mobile apps here either. It’s purely a web-based backend.