Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

Hey, over the last year we've been building ente[1], an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos.

We have shipped open-source[2] web and mobile apps that have preserved 180,000+ files. Apart from cross-device sync, you can share your albums end-to-end encrypted, and filter photos by location and time.

We recently had a "successful" launch on r/degoogle[3]. We wanted to Show HN after incorporating the feedback we received from there, but since OP asked, I thought I’ll drop a comment here.

If you’ve any questions, please ask.

[1]: https://ente.io

[2]: https://github.com/ente-io

[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/njatok/we_built_a...

choward · 5 years ago

I can't tell if this is self hosted or not. All I see is a centralized option. If not self hostable, a user still can't guarantee that this doesn't just end up being as bad as google photos. There are plenty of companies like this that provide an alternative to the mainstream then sell out. Really, the only person you can trust is yourself at the end of the day.

vishnumohandas · 5 years ago

Hey, ente is currently not directed at an audience that has the knowledge and energy to set up and maintain a reliable storage infrastructure.

We had started off as a self-hosted project, but ran into difficulties monetizing that model. We wanted to pay our rents, and continue working on this, and an E2EE SaaS was a way forward.

We are not averse to supporting a self-hosted version in the future. But that commitment requires engineering and support bandwidth, which we don’t have right now.

sp332 · 5 years ago

Down in the reddit comments it says it is not self-hosted because of limited "engineering bandwidth".

nsteel · 5 years ago

I got and email about this few weeks back (I must have signed up to the list at some point) but I was put off by two things.

> We've already preserved 100,000+ files, and are quite reliable at this point.

"quite reliable" doesn't cut it for a paid service for me, even a new one.

My second issue, and I might be wrong about this, is that there's no way to share photos with someone who isn't a (paying) ente user.

vishnumohandas · 5 years ago

> "quite reliable"

As an engineer, I shy away from using superlatives. But sorry, I now understand that this could have been phrased better. Thank you for pointing it out.

> no way to share photos

Correction, the receiver can be on the free plan.

StavrosK · 5 years ago

I think this is a mismatch between UK English where "quite" means "extremely" and US English where "quite" means "mostly".

dbmnt · 5 years ago

> We have shipped open-source[2] web and mobile apps that have preserved 180,000+ files.

Is that the total number of files on your platform? Not to be rude, but is this supposed to be impressive or reassuring? My photo collection is approaching half that number, and I'm just one person, so now I'm feeling completely underwhelmed by the claim.

vishnumohandas · 5 years ago

I felt that having replicated 200k files without failures is an indicator of reliability (not scale).

But you're right, the number is minuscule compared to where we are hoping to be. We're just getting started and I'm hopeful that we will 10x this number in the next few months.

WhyNotHugo · 5 years ago

This looks pretty neat, I wonder how I've been missing it so far.

Do you have an public API? I'd love to have a tiny sync client to fetch photos and store them on my laptop.

vishnumohandas · 5 years ago

The API is public, but the documentation needs work.

If your current use case is only to sync your uploaded files to a local folder, we have an Electron app that does just that: https://github.com/ente-io/bhari-frame/releases/tag/v1.0.3

rubyfan · 5 years ago

What is the design target for this service? Is it the technophile who is trying to degoogle, is it some other specific design target or perhaps more general audience?

If it’s degooglers then perhaps convincing us it has everything Google Photos had is job number 1. If it’s missing feature X then you’ve got a reason to say no, if it’s at parity then it comes down to whether we trust YOU and is the deal good enough.

You’ve already convinced us you’re not Google so there is some things implied but you need to lean into it. Privacy, not having you information used for ad targeting, never sharing our photos or information derived with third parties - those are all thing to highlight (be the anti-Google).

I think you need some other killer feature or appeal that makes you different than iCloud here since Apple are already the anti-Google. I think you can also get 2TB of iCloud Photo storage for $10 a month so you gotta hit that if you want to charge $15 for 500GB.

raybb · 5 years ago

What's your strategy to get enough users so that you become financially sustainable?

vishnumohandas · 5 years ago

The current set of paid users are sufficient to break-even on the infrastructure costs.

As for personnel costs, a few more hundred paying users and we'll be set. Feedback from existing users have been positive, and we should be able to reach that point by end of the year.

It helps that we're living in one of the cheaper parts of the globe, and are not motivated by money. We're building this because an easy to use, privacy friendly alternative needs to exist.

iamthepieman · 5 years ago

180,000 photos seems tiny. I have about 20k photos just on my own, my wife probably has more. 180k is like 10-50 people. Not saying you can't handle it but 180k doesnt signal "I've got scaling all figured out" to me.

vishnumohandas · 5 years ago

More than scale, it was trust and reliability that I wanted to show. Of these, I feel that scale is the simpler problem to solve.

jshmrsn · 5 years ago

Everything has to start somewhere.

mavhc · 5 years ago

I have 180,000 photos in Google Photos

totoglazer · 5 years ago

I’m at 93k myself…

siddharthgoel88 · 5 years ago

Does this service encourages user outside EU?

What about latency concerns for people who are not based in EU? I saw on that website that the servers are hosted in EU, and say I need to use it in Asia will have service have usable latency?

vishnumohandas · 5 years ago

Hey, some of our users (and us) are based out of Asia, and have not observed latency to be an issue. We are currently tunneling our data over Cloudflare, and that helps quite a bit.

If you find observable latency within the service, please write to vishnu[at]ente.io. I will see what we can do.

nindalf · 5 years ago

As a user of ente, I can say I’m pretty happy. It doesn’t have all the features that Google has but they’ve made a promising start. If the search feature becomes comparable, I’d move off Google photos permanently.

bgdam · 5 years ago

Can the search feature of ente become comparable to Google Photos? AFAIK, ente does E2E encryption, which means that unless they index the EXIF data on each single device, and also run the image recognition algorithms on device, the search is never going to be comparable to Google Photos.

jasim · 5 years ago

Kudos to the name! The meaning ("ente" = "mine" in Malayalam) meshes deeply with what the service is, and it is short and easy for everyone to pronounce.

llampx · 5 years ago

It means duck in German.

vishnumohandas · 5 years ago

Glad you like it. :)

tealpod · 5 years ago

Product looks simple and promising as a good alternative to google photos.

Feedback: You can improve your website looks.

Goodluck

vishnumohandas · 5 years ago

Thank you!

Regarding the website, I would be grateful if you could point out the worst part(s). I would love to improve.

Solocomplex · 5 years ago

Why is every string in all lowercase? It reminds me of tumblr..

vishnumohandas · 5 years ago

We thought it looked playful, friendly that way, and less like a boring archival-solution. We liked that persona.

ludjer · 5 years ago

Are there any plans to add search and automatic image tagging ?

vishnumohandas · 5 years ago

Our web app[1] lets you search by time ("last week", "April 14", ...) and location ("New York").

Tagging faces and objects is on our roadmap, we will ship it.

[1]: https://web.ente.io

To be honest, $2/month isn't that unreasonable from a useful service. I would definitely class Google Photos as useful, especially its ability to search for pictures.

I personally use iCloud, and back everything to a Synology.

chomp · 5 years ago

It is not, however for some of us, there was an implicit “I let you datamine my images, you host them” relationship. Having to pay google tips the scales, so why not spend your $2 on a more privacy oriented service?

smolyeet · 5 years ago

Because the people willing to pay Google for their service don't mind the use of their pictures to better their services elsewhere. Google didn't get to be where it was without us , and the fight for privacy isn't worth it for some (most) people. Alternatives usually involve self hosting, trusting a privacy focused service , or not doing it at all. It's tiring. I respect the effort , but In a lot of ways it feels like going backwards.

Jabbles · 5 years ago

What kind of datamining? I suppose we have no way of actually knowing if it's true, but Google does say they don't use Photos data for ads:

As always, we don’t sell your information to anyone, and we don’t use information in apps where you primarily store personal content—such as Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Photos—for advertising purposes, period.

https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/keeping-priva...

weird-eye-issue · 5 years ago

I love being able to search random things like "Honda" or "waffles" to find pictures from years ago in a few seconds. I use it often now that I can do it

stevage · 5 years ago

Because most competitors are much more than $2/mo.

patrickaljord · 5 years ago

At $2 per month they are probably still subsidizing you with datamining.

Deleted Comment

pindab0ter · 5 years ago

What’s your setup for that? How do you sync (incoming) photos to an arbitrary place outside of the Photos library?

kyrra · 5 years ago

Different tool, but this forum post lists some options: https://forum.photostructure.com/t/automatic-phone-uploads/2...

Some of the tools recommended are:

https://syncthing.net/

https://www.resilio.com/

https://www.photosync-app.com/home.html

lordnacho · 5 years ago

I'm not the GP but what I do is all my camera devices will sync to a cloud drive, and my NAS then syncs the cloud drive. Google Photos seems to be able to see them. That way I always have two copies of the image, a cloud version and a local.

The main failure mode I'm concerned about is if Google decides I'm no longer worthy of an account. In that case I'll still have my pics and I'll put in the effort to set up some other service.

nowahe · 5 years ago

I've been using icloud-photos-downloader[0] for a while now, running as a Scheduled Task on my Synology. It supports 2FA as well, I just have to re-auth every 3-4 months.

[0] : https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...

plank_time · 5 years ago

Synology has an iPhone app called DS Photo you can use to download pics directly to your NAS.

fomine3 · 5 years ago

I'm fine my photos are managed by Google, so I signed up 100GB plan of Google One. Google Opinion Rewards provides me enough money to fulfill the annual fee.

spamalot159 · 5 years ago

How are you getting so many surveys? I can't seem to get more than one every few months!

- The de-duplication didn't seem to work, it at least was defeated by my messy files. I spent many hours manually going through the results and finding many dupes. Then I lost interest in doing that and gave up.

- can't use datestamp info in the filename? - very, very slow to sync from my external USB 3 drive. I'd be happy with that if the de-duplication worked. Also the status about what it's doing seems sporadic and half the time appears to be doing nothing at all. Maybe my laptop is too slow? - no map view

mtlynch · 5 years ago

If you're willing to self-host, Photoprism[0] is pretty nice and easy to get up and running.

It has the flavor of Google Photos, but it's definitely a step down in UX. One of the features I really love about Google Photos is the ability to jump quickly through time. Like if I'm looking for a photo I took around June 2018, I can get to it in <5 seconds.

I didn't realize what a magical feature it is until I tried looking for it with alternatives and found that they all have a lot of scrolling, pausing to load new photos, more scrolling.

But I'm impressed with what Photoprism has achieved as a small, donation-funded OSS project, so I'm hoping to see them grow.

[0] https://photoprism.app

jessedhillon · 5 years ago

>Like if I'm looking for a photo I took around June 2018, I can get to it in <5 seconds.

Not only that, you can search for a photo of a light bulb you know you took, but don't know when, but simply typing "light bulb".

PhotoPrism does this too.

hanniabu · 5 years ago

Do you know if they have a portable option so i can keep it on my external drive that i have all my media on?

durovo · 5 years ago

Yes, I have it installed locally. Haven't played around with it much though, features like grouping by face were not present the last time I checked. Honestly, Google Photos is just too convenient. Photoprism is a good backup option though.

ping_pong · 5 years ago

mceachen · 5 years ago

You're certainly welcome to try PhotoStructure! It's got very robust de-duplication, supports portable libraries (so you can automatically sweep your photos scattered across many drives and computers into a single timestamped folder structure), and a novel UI showing a random sampled view of your library.

There's also an active forum for both support and to discuss what and how new features are built out.

https://photostructure.com/

Disclaimer: I'm the (only) author.

Vaslo · 5 years ago

I have an unRaid server and I found your app to be the easiest to use, but I had to switch to photo prism because you don’t have an easy way to tell the difference between photos and videos.

I know you previously responded that people should upvote that feature, but the inability to distinguish video from photo just seems like a must have fix over other potentially over engineered stuff that others are asking for.

(I just had a family member ask for this feature today in our family's PhotoStructure library: I'll get it into the next beta build which I hope to release in a day or two)

kingosticks · 5 years ago

I really didn't have much luck with the de-duplication. I tried photostructure for about 3 weeks and since stopped. I was trying to pull photos from multiple different drives/folders into one central organised place. A few issues:

Edit: I've just realised, was this (by design) simply copying each photo into the merged tree but then if I browse using the photostructure app it will hide the dupes? Can I prevent it making a copy? I want to use other file/photo browsers also.

I did like the feed of random photos. I saw loads of great old snaps I'd forgotten about. Somewhat bizarrely, when I wanted to share them quickly with others I ended up taking a photo of the photo(s) with my smartphone and sharing that via WhatsApp. That's more my failing but it did seem a bit silly that I resorted to doing that.

> if I browse using the PhotoStructure app it will guide the dupes

Yes: out of an abundance of caution, the unique (by SHA) variations of each asset are copied into your library. There are heuristics that pick which is the "best," and although those heuristics seem to be robust for most beta users, I didn't want to be the source of want data loss.

> datestamp info in the filename?

The metadata in the file is trusted more than any date extracted either from the filename or the directory hierarchy. Details are here: https://photostructure.com/faq/captured-at/

If you use the info tool, it'll tell you how it's extracting the date from any given file: https://photostructure.com/server/tools/#file-information

> slow to sync

PhotoStructure scales imports to accommodate current hardware, in Ann effort to keep the system responsive. Parallelism is limited by available RAM and CPU count. If you think it was being too conservative, please send me a screen shot of your about page (it includes both system metrics and what is thinking for scheduling limits), and if you want, debug logs, and we can look into what's going on. https://photostructure.com/faq/error-reports/#how-to-manuall...

> no map view

This is a popular feature request that I'm looking forward to building: https://forum.photostructure.com/t/support-reverse-geocoding...

hoherd · 5 years ago

FYI I just went to look for videos on YT showing off PhotoStructure and was amazed to see exactly 0 hits for "photostructure"[1]. Seems like a big opportunity waiting.

- [1] <https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22photostructu...>

Oof, yeah, I've got to sit down and record some screencasts. Thanks for the reminder.

nexuist · 5 years ago

Thank you for building this. I was thinking of building my own but I think I'll try this out!

Aeolun · 5 years ago

Oh. Deduplication across all drives! Consider me interested. Will try this out later.

I had boxes and boxes of old drives that I wanted to get organized which drove that feature: https://photostructure.com/about/introducing-photostructure/...

It's also why I implemented bitrot detection and metadata inference. A beta tester just called the date parsing heuristics "freaking awesome and so close to black magic…" :)

https://forum.photostructure.com/t/combining-images/524/7

(And if you prefer the command line, know you can do tons of things via the CLI: https://photostructure.com/server/tools/ )

JamesDeepDown · 5 years ago

WARNING! Be aware that this is an Electron app. I tried it, and using the interface was like swimming in glue. I presumed this meant "Electron app" and a quick check confirmed it.

WARNING! Some users don't know that there are two other editions of PhotoStructure (docker and "bare metal" node) that run on macOS, Windows and Linux, all of which don't include Electron.

https://photostructure.com/server/photostructure-for-servers...

kissgyorgy · 5 years ago

Nextcloud! I can't praise and recommend them enough! https://nextcloud.com/

You can self-host it, it's license is ASGI, so it's never going away, and it has an app for photos: https://github.com/nextcloud/photos

and another one where you can put all your photos on a map: https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/maps

saint-loup · 5 years ago

Nextcloud also has a mobile app, with an feature for automatic upload of your pictures and quite a few settings (which folder to upload, etc.)

leetrout · 5 years ago

https://www.smugmug.com/ and https://www.flickr.com/ (Same parent company now).

Chris MacAskill founded it with his son. Pretty solid company, seems like.

https://mixergy.com/interviews/smugmug-chris-macaskill-inter...

vzaliva · 5 years ago

I would never use or recommend Flickr. They lied to me. As premium user (for many yars) the promise to me was that photos uploaded will be kept free forever as long as the service exists. Even if I stop paying. Then they went back on that. They may have a very good reasons, but the trust was broken.

techrat · 5 years ago

Flickr hasn't been under the same ownership twice over now.

They were owned by Yahoo for a while. Has the management changed since the one that broke your trust?

justusthane · 5 years ago

I've been a paying customer of SmugMug for years and highly recommend them. I use it as a photography portfolio though, not as a Google Photos replacement (although it certainly can be used that was as well).

ghaff · 5 years ago

Yeah. I don't use the community aspect of flickr much these days but seems a pretty solid place to upload photos and share them.

joshmn · 5 years ago

I use a Synology[0] NAS and use their Photos software with an additional backup to both rsync.net and BackBlaze, in addition to using Google Photos — which I'll happily pay for. (humor my redundancy: I'm extra paranoid about losing memories of my mother.)

[0] https://www.synology.com

arriu · 5 years ago

I second this recommendation. I've done the whole DIY NAS thing a number of times but the Synology solution is just far more convenient and usually just works. Additionally, the there are so many other benefits to running a NAS, like the opportunity to plug in a set of IP cameras for security...

Also, the OP doesn't need to get rid of Google Photos. They can keep Google Photos as a off-site back-up.

ghjjjgv · 5 years ago

Also there the Moments app by Synology that automatically backs up your photos to your NAS.

I third this recommendation.

I use the pointy clicky AWS Glacier backups app in case everything goes sideways.

darau1 · 5 years ago

Why backblaze? /r/datahoarder also recommends them, but I couldn't find a reason.

They are cheap and they recently added an S3-like API, so lots of apps that let you point at an S3-bucket-like URL just work.

Nadya · 5 years ago

Extremely reliable and one of the most "no muss, no fuss." backups. I had a drive fail and was able to recover all of my files by having them ship me a drive with my data on it and I returned the drive for basically no expense of my own (I have several 4-5TB drives and had an old 2TB drive fail. All for $5/mo to know that I don't have to worry about backup of cold-storage files for as long as they're in business.

risyachka · 5 years ago

They are very reliable and have a very reasonable price which is hard to find these days.

pjs_ · 5 years ago

Not even remotely an alternative in terms of usability/reliability, but I can describe my DIY setup.

I have a DIY NAS, based on a Raspberry Pi and an external hard disk enclosure, running in my kitchen. The disks are encrypted with LUKS. A combination of Syncthing and a cron job ensure that photos from my phone are constantly synced to the NAS without any input from me, and old photos are removed from my phone. A nice bonus is that if someone were to search my phone, they would not find many photos on it. I also never run out of space for photos/videos on my phone.

To view photos I use Shotwell. It does a decent if not perfect job of tagging, basic editing etc.

For encrypted, deduplicated offsite backups I use rsync.net and Borg, again together with a cron job.

All this crap is configured with Ansible in an effort to make it a little less fragile and more reproducible. It has been running without maintenance for a year or so but if you take this path, expect to spend many, many hours tearing your hair out over SAMBA Unix permissions and all sorts of other delights...

hiisukun · 5 years ago

I have a similar setup, but with the Shotwell part replaced by Lychee. It's a self-hostable photo browsing web app. I can share photos with family members that way, like how I might share a google photo album to them.

cyberge99 · 5 years ago

Second for Lychee. If self-hosting, I would also recommend Piwigo. It has a nice complementary phone app.

sva_ · 5 years ago

I'm doing pretty much the same thing with an rpi/syncthing. It's simple enough and "just works", while maintaining full ownership of my photos/videos. I looked into Shotwell and it seems pretty nice. I haven't really used anything to organize my Photos so far. One might say it's well worth a shot (sorry.)

qq4 · 5 years ago

I have always made a separate user with no login for network shares, be it syncthing or samba and never ran into permission problems. The samba config is pretty friendly with permission options. If anyone has ran into problems I might be able to help.

MeinBlutIstBlau · 5 years ago

I'm interested in your rassberry pi nas. Can it be done with a pi0? I've got one laying around and would love to put it to good use. I'm familiar with syncthing so it doesn't sound too much trouble for me right now.

I would expect that a pi0 could do it - depends on what sort of performance you want. An of course for a NAS you are better off with an Ethernet port - I would recommend a full-size SBC for this reason. But no fundamental reason why a pi0 can't do it. Here's a nice example: https://hackaday.io/project/8688-raspberry-pi-zero-altoid-na...

scambier · 5 years ago

not OP, but I tried to setup a NAS with my older B+, and it was really unreliable. The disk went to sleep every few minutes even when there was a file being read/written.