https://immich.app/
Best Google Photos Alternative I found so far.
The dev warns though
⚠️ The project is under very active development. Expect bugs and changes. Do not use it as the only way to store your photos and videos!
That's why I still also use Google Photos at the same time
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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I've tried various self hosted photo synchronization and management solutions, multiple times.
Lychee, PiGallery2, Libre photos, Immich, and Nextcloud all fell short in different areas.
The long-term solution I've landed on is Photoprism for management and PhotoSync.
I've found Photoprism to have the most features to meet my needs (mainly albums, public links with password protection) as well as not being too resource intensive. However, there isn't a mobile app, but the mobile web interface is great.
PhotoSync is a paid app. But I've been using this for syncing for 3+ years now and it's been very reliable.
My photos are also backed up to an external drive daily and also encrypted and uploaded to Wasabi for redundancy.
Thanks for the suggestions. Do you have the premium version of PhotoSync?
Yes I have the paid version with all features. But it looks like the add-ons have been split into a few different in app purchases. Just taking a quick look at the free version, it appears to support transfer to local machines. If you want the auto transfer feature, that's a paid feature.
Syncthing is good free alternative as well. I use it primarily for documents between devices, I just haven't tried it with photos since I already have the PhotoSync app configured.
Auto transfer in photosync is super intermittent even on the paid version on Android. It seems to auto transfer only infrequently and not until you've opened the app at least once since your last reboot. If you don't open the app in between reboots the sync never really happens. I'm not saying it's not worth it to just buy the premium bundle for$4 or whatever, but it definitely does not work perfectly as expected. I'm willing to put up with a little bit of brokenness though so that I don't have to write my own.
I've been using PhotoSync (paid) as well (for years). I've set up a SMB server on a home machine. Launch PhotoSync and it shows the recent photos which haven't been synced, long-press the "quick sync" button and it uploads them. Fast and simple.
Have you tried Syncthing? It's not the same as Google Photos, but I think it's one of the best file synchronization software yet. I don't use it to sync my photos, though, I use it for syncing my markdown notes.
Adding support for Syncthing. It is the closest thing to Dropbox that I've found self-hosted. And that's perfect for syncing photos to my server. Also as a plus, I can then easily transfer large files from my server to my phone while away! It's just the syncing part. I am still looking for a good album solution.
I started with Google photos, now I use immich on my home server and share it with my family
I use Synology Photos, has worked quite well, but that's obviously only an option if you have Synology NAS.
I use OneDrive for the auto-upload feature. I know it's not selfhosted, but I want an off-site copy of my pictures anyway, and the phone app works really well for auto-uploading. I had previously tried Nextcloud's auto-upload, but many times the uploading was stuck and I had to fix it manually.
I then have nightly rclone jobs to download the photos from OneDrive and store them locally. To view them locally, I use Photoview, which works really well with an existing directory structure.
I use Nextcloud with Memories addon but I also use it for general file storage from many sources. If you only need photo sync Immich might make more sense.
I'm currently using Immich & Nextcloud too. I have some backups in Google Photos, but mainly trying to keep a hold of the photos myself. Having Immich & Nextcloud at least gives me two copies of my photos as a precaution.