I have switched most of my daily apps to FOSS alternatives or privacy adhering closed apps, however I cannot find a suitable replacement to Google Photos, at least not without significant compromises.
My key factor to choosing an appropriate alternative to app is its UI, which you may think has nothing to do with privacy. But as it turns out, there are plenty of alternative apps that I could switch to, which makes it difficult for me as a layman FOSS user to choose from. So naturally I would to resort to the option that looks and behaves similar to the original app the most. As said before, I haven’t faced a problem in switching in the case of other apps, but for some unknown reason I cannot find a good Photos alternative for myself anywhere.
Does anyone know the app I am looking for? I am still open to using apps that provide greater functionalities if it comes at the cost of appearance. it is just that I don’t wish to use a 10-year old looking software for a core purpose of my new phone. Apart from the UI, I just need the app to have local functionality since I don’t really back my photos in the cloud.
Edit: I don’t have the facility to self host, thus I would be avoiding apps that only rely on self hosting images
Why not something like Nextcloud, a self-hosted almost google-suite that has docs editing, photos backup, etc? Setup a simple domain name, point a dynamic dns to it, host it on your computer at home, with a family member that maybe hosts a backup for you, and voila. Control of your data.
If you don’t want to host it yourself, I think there are providers out there too.
Recently found UhuruPhotos, which uses LibrePhotos for self-hosted syncing.
Not open source but Synology photos is probably as close as you can get to a Google photos experience. Of course you need a Synology nas.
I did not know about this… And I happen to have a Synology nas.
Filen
I use filen too but it doesn’t sync/upload my photos until I open the app, does it work in the background on your phone ?
No, not really. I thought that it was because the app was locked behind its own app lock. Guess its a app problem. It might be on their roadmap, who knows. I’ll search around for a bit.
