Google has updated its privacy policy to allow personal information from Gmail, Google Photos, and Drive to potentially be used for targeted advertising, raising new questions about how the company handles users’ private data.
The change, which took effect on October 16, introduces a significant exception to Google’s previous promise that it would not use content from these services to personalize advertisements.
As first spotted by Android Authority, the updated policy specifically affects users who connect their personal information to Google’s AI-powered services, including Search and Gemini.
What about a good Google Photos alternative? Preferably something I can self-host. (Cloud storage is fine too, 1TB minimum, $15/mo max.) I’ve been wanting to DeGoogle for years but haven’t yet out of convenience.
Must have, no compromise features: A “Memories” feature that works as good as Google’s, and a search box that lets me find images by describing what’s in them.
Edit: Thanks for all the helpful replies. Looks like I have a lot of homework to do. Keep the suggestions coming.
Immich as recommended by a few others, and there’s also Nextcloud, but keep in mind Nextcloud is a little “heavier” in that it has more functions and features.
For example it can be used as a drive, calendar, contacts, notes, and photo alternative. Look into a addin for Nextcloud called memories that I personally like better than the native photo app.
I run both immich and Nextcloud, as well as a bunch of other alternatives to Google’s services.
Nextcloud is awful with photos. Loads slow, no useful features for photos. Otherwise it’s great but would go for immich any day when it comes to photos
I felt that nextcloud photos/memories was a bit lackluster compared to immich, but good news is, via community plugins you’re able to integrate immich into your nextcloud as if it were part of the suite and you get the best of both worlds.
Nextcloud for gdrive, office, email, todo lists, calendar, Spotify, a kanban board, budget tracker, and a simple notes option (personally I prefer obsidian w/ nc file sync and I might do tiny edits/touch ups in notes since it’s all markdown anyway)
Though I saw there’s a way to use obsidian gui through a docker container, so you COULD use the external links feature to have it also be accessible through nextcloud, which is tempting but its more fluff that I don’t feel like dealing with rn…
Are you talking about Nextcloud core, or specifically the Nextcloud Photos app?
This repo exists solely to help you compare all the alternatives.
My quick look through the feature matrix, the best options (purely in terms of the number of features in the comparison) are Ente, Immich, and Nextcloud (there’s both Nextcloud Photos and Nextcloud Memories—I’m not sure how they work together vs separately). Unfortunately a “memories” feature isn’t in the feature matrix, but from a quick search I believe all the options I just named have it.
Immich allows search for text and objects in the photos, using integrated free, local-run small AI models. I haven’t used a memories feature but I believe one may have rolled out in the last update.
Honestly, Immich is a free self-host option and is incredibly close to Google Photos. I think if you’re holding out for exactly identical feature parity, though, you may never be satisfied.
I don’t know exactly what’s in the Google Photos memories, but immich absolutely has a memories with pictures on that day in previous years.
IDK. A lot of people like to self-host immich.
I use and android phone so this would be my next step on de-googling.
100% Immich. Really good UI, and the kinds of quality of life features you don’t normally find in smaller open source apps (auto face tagging, map based on coordinates of photos, built-in non-destructive editor, memories, etc)
The memories feature is mostly just “here’s photos/videos you took on this date”, but it doesn’t compile any sort of custom album based on a theme or place or anything like that. Not hard to do so yourself by just going to the map view and zooming into any location though.
As for image searching it does have that, and I’ve found it to be shockingly reliable even when I run it on just a Raspberry Pi. (though it can take a while to give you the result of your search if you’re on lower-end hardware like that)
Damnit, you had me sold up until this part. I need the memories feature to work exactly how it does on GPhotos (or in a similar way). But I still have a lot of comment replies to sort through so I’m hopeful I’ll find the perfect replacement.
Maybe try Ente then?
Haven’t used it before myself, but I’ve heard good things, and it does have a memories feature, and it seems at least based on the examples on their website that it might generate something more than just “today x years ago”.
Unsure to what degree it works though, and unfortunately Ente is also a paid service (though it is privacy focused, and I believe it has a FOSS app too)
Seems like “Smart Memories” are on the roadmap for Immich though, so you might just have to wait a bit and can then switch once they’re there:
There aren’t really any other mature options out there for self hosted, or even just private Google Photos alternatives in my experience, so you’re kinda just stuck with Immich for the most feature-complete replacement, and Ente for a more “just works” private but not self-hosted one. Everything else is basically just a glorified file browser, but maybe with some smart searching or better media codec support.
Smart Memories sounds exactly like what I want so I’ll definitely check it out once the feature goes Gold. Thanks for doing the heavy lifting for me.