Posted by dt3ft 3 days ago
I now use Immich [1] (mentioned elsewhere in this thread but without the proper link), having purchased a single-payment lifetime family licence. There is, as I understand it, no benefit to me to purchase it. After a month of use it was clear this was going to stay in use for quite a while, and the author(s) have done a fantastic job. So feel free to give it a shot, alongside google photos app on your phone, and see how you feel.
It's not for everyone though, as I have an old computer at home running as a 'server' that can host immich. There's a certain nerd level requirement (that this forum should be full of) to get it set up. For users though? It's so far seamless -- my partner uses the app on her phone and likes it just fine. The backup works for her and there's a single button to click to clear space on her phone that just deletes things immich knows are on our home server already. Very useful.
I still open google photos app to edit videos occasionally -- it's better at that, and I do still use the google built in 'camera' app, so I'm kind of using google photos while I take pictures if that makes sense.
I find it better than google photos already in some ways. For example, to add photos to an album google forces you to scroll slowly through all of them so the thumbnails load, before you can multi select them all. Immich just let me select the top picture, go straight to the bottom and select all of them. Makes a difference when adding over a thousand photos!
Nonetheless, a positive move in the right direction!
I have a homelab setup with my media server stuff and frigate (for security cameras), and they're only accessible via tailscale if I'm not at home. It would theoretically be easy enough to throw immich in there as well but I don't know how the app will behave when it can't reach the server half the time
Immich has automatic URL switching, so it detects which network it's on and select between the internal and external URLs. When I'm not on my home WiFi it switches to the Tailscale URL. Tailscale must be connected for this to work obviously.
PS: I used to be an employee, and there was a time i needed an account help for an old account who was clearly definitely mine, and they were of no help. Good for security, terrible if you get flagged.
I found it quite inconvenient; you'd try to open the photos app from the photos button on the camera but it didn't work for me. Did you find a way to make the integration decent?
It used to use your default gallery app, I see it as another anti-competitive choice on googles part
Every other time I open it, it shows a pop-up asking "Can we use your payment data to show you more relevant ads?" which is annoying but what's more aggravating is the choices: "Yes", "Remind me Later".
I only carry my wallet with my physical ID card when I know it will be needed: doctors' appointments, traveling to other countries inside Schengen, etc.
Gone back to physical cards.
In order to be exposed to targeted advertising? That seems excessive for the end goals (not mentioning the fact that you cannot opt out).
I came from Picasa, (20+ years ago) eventually went on to Google Photos later. I kept that one as a back-up for a pretty long time, besides being a long-time paid user. I’m still on one of their cheaper tier for the family as Google’s services are such that we got to use one or the other (read relatives, friends, extended family etc).
However, I have made sure that if I have to walk or get blocked or something of the sorts that happens to people, I will just walk - no emotions attached.
Disclaimer: Article from my own personal blog, but I did blog about why and how I completely did away with Google Photos from our core photos collection (I still use it to host a bnunch of archives for friends, and families group photos).
https://brajeshwar.com/2021/how-to-delete-all-photos-and-get...
Once full you are caught in their trap: pay a monthly fee to the mafia or delete your data!
This flow is intentional and they have set up everything to bring you there. The Photo-Backup popup (and arguably the whole photo feature) helps to shovel users more quickly to the end of the monetization funnel.
I remember there being a mini scandal about this feature being limited to 3 uses or something, but can't seem to find the story right now.
https://support.google.com/photos/thread/405321957?hl=en&msg...
Just remember that Google always kills its products, and they are an advertising company.
I'm joking, I hope, but Google ain't what it used to be.
And someone will complain - you can't even have sensible defaults.
I understand you perhaps have hatred for google but hosting immich or ente is not for everyone.
It is far easier for average Jose to pay for GP or some cloud.
Unless you plan to setup at least some free cloud don't bother to lecture others
To have a healthy relationship with technology requires holding manufacturers and service providers responsible for our mental health.
Your suggested alternative of moving all photos to a laptop doesn't work for the people who prefer having all their photos accessible from their smartphone. That's the usable UI that the constant sync to cloud services gives them. The tradeoff is the cloud storage subsciption costs.
Also, transferring all photos to a laptop creates a single-point-of-failure if the laptop dies. Recovering photos becomes even more complicated when the internal SSD is encrypted with macOS File Vault or Windows BitLocker. Yes, photos in cloud storage isn't really a "true backup" in the 3-2-1 best practices sense but it's still more durable against catastrophic data loss than a single laptop.
The self-hosted Immich photo server is just one way to enable smartphone access to all photos and avoid paying for cloud storage. That's the reward for the "overkill" setup.
But after saying no three times, it really ought to leave the user alone...
- wtf gmail is full
At some point people should take self responsibility for their accounts.
[0] https://ente.com
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
- click on the account icon
- choose switch account and pick use this application without an account
For me, I want to use Google Photos exclusively to see my past backups but never back anything up again.
Unfortunately, it seems to completely mess up the interface?
I couldn't even see all photos anymore. Even though I do not use backup at all. So it is not possible that those photos are in the cloud or something.
Or clear data completely, then open the app "for the first time" and immediately log out.
It'll work, but as you've discovered, google made sure that it isn't the happy path.
Also no search (not even by file name), no albums, some editing functions won't work (even though they're local), and a few more annoyances. but also no more backup prompt...
I closed the app, stopped it and cleared the cache. Then restarted it.
The UI is surprisingly sane now. My first impression is that it is much better than before. Everything is neatly layed out in a series of albums, for each the latest images are shown and I can click on the album name and it displays them all.
So I do see my albums. Those seem to be just directories in /Pictures/ which it seems I can edit with the files app?
Am I missing out on anything this way? I don't need search.
All the usualy edit functions like cropping, adjusting colors etc also seem to still be there.
Also is it possible to undo (in case there's something I don't like?) Is it just a matter of adding the app back to your account?
No idea about Lens, because I never used it. Aren't there webapps or web services for everything these days? I do everything that I do only occasionally via webapps. Barcode parsing for example.
Somebody in my family who generally doesn't pay that much attention to prompts and modals was repeatedly telling me their Gmail doesn't work because it's full and - surprize - it was because Google Photos was harassing them with the backup prompt, which in a hurry, they just re-activated every time I turned it off.
After a while and much convincing (and changing Immich to be the default gallery app), we're pretty happy. Immich has been very good, it's fast enough to not be bothering, and running it on TrueNAS has been quite hands-off. I have a mirrored 6TB drive and do off-site backups to a Hetzner storage box.
Previously we were using OneDrive and the Photos archiving was horribly slow for everything but the most recent months. It was literally unusable beyond a certain date, with the UI locking up, tabs crashing, huge amounts of memory consumed by the open tab, etc. The mobile app was only marginally better, but still very slow. Immich doesn't have this problem. I scroll back years of photos and they load almost instantly from HDDs.
I find Google Photos asks me once every update. I got a Pixel 9 with 1 year of free Gemini Pro (or whatever version it is, their offering almost feels like Windows 7 Home Enterprise Ultimate), but because of their nagging about the backup I loathe to give them money to subscribe to Gemini beyond that.
I have a Google Pixel 1 I got from eBay, with "lifetime free photos backup", sitting plugged in on a shelf. Every evening my main phone syncs photos I take on it to my NAS, and another app copies the images from the NAS to that Pixel phone, which then backs it up to Google Photos... it's my finger to Google for being the enshittfiying assholes they are
You can store 2TB for $14 per month; to fill that with photos you'd have to shoot 0.5GB/day for 10 years.
You can spend less - Google Drive and iCloud will offer 2TB for $10/month - but they don't really want power users who use their whole quota, so they don't make things like command line / API access easy.
Likewise Backblaze has an 'unlimited' backup option - but it's desktop mac-and-windows only, and it's selective about what it backs up - only 'user generated' files.
I have 850GB in B2 across all the backups I store there and I pay around 7$ a month. Any better price from any underdog provider? I'm definetely not going to pay 10EUR/month for Google One's 2TB.
I still need to check if I can optimize B2 costs by using different tiers (I mean, these are mainly disaster recovery backups so I dont care about fast copy times)