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Google Photos Alternative

I believe that everyone is already aware of Google's tracking records as one of the most privacy-invading company of all time, given their terrible privacy policy, business choices, and ongoing user tracking. However, Google does have certain products that are pretty good, like Google Photos app is one of its better ones. I can see why people would use it It's quick, packed with incredible features, and makes finding photos simple.

However, it is awful for privacy given Google's track history. Recently, though, I found a upon a fantastic alternative called Ente. With real privacy and it doesn't steal your data, it offers nearly all of the features of Google Photos. It is open source, features easy sharing, end-to-end encryption, and allows you to view, organize, and download your data in its original quality across all of its platforms with consistency.

Unfortunately, if you are someone who frequently takes images and has pictures of years and years worth of stuff, you may have to pay for more storage, although the costs are not too high. To minimize space while using Ente, I would consider copying a bunch of images to an external hard drive or SSD. You can also delete unnecessary old screenshots or photos that you don't want to keep saved in your memories to save up storage.

https://ente.io/

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10 comments

  • If you're into self hosting Immich is awesome. Completely replaced Google Photos for me

  • I love ente! For those who run home servers it can also be self hosted so you don’t have to pay out the nose for storage space

  • It is a great idea to move away from Google and move towards hosting your own services. Ente looks like it could be useful for many people to begin that transition. I will point out some common pitfalls to watch out for. But don't let them stop you from making this transition: Google has most of these same risks.

    • As a private, for-profit company that offers its own hosted services, it will always face a conflict between the features it includes in its "free" self-hosted version vs. its paid offering. Most companies that try this eventually sell out, either by changing their offerings or by selling the company to another one that is looking to reap some quick profits.

    • If the company goes under, so do your backups. All your photos. You may run into a situation where you lose all of your photos or where your photos are basically held hostage with an exorbitant export fee for that one last cash grab. For this reason I would suggest prioritizing using something like Ente as a *self-hosted service ". If you do your own backups right then you will never lose your photos.

    • You will have to pay close attention to the project when you seld-host. Unless you are particularly good at network and computer security, your self-hosted instance will be able to poke around your computer or network if it wants to. You are trusting the project to not eventually include any spyware (they often call it "telemetry" nowadays) or worse. So basically... pay close attention to the project's community and news and be careful during upgrades.

    • Do begin learning security best practices. You will avoid a lot of pitfalls by running your services on virtual machines with their own IPs on your network and good (highly restrictive) firewall rules. This isolates your application from the computer it is running on and from sniffing around your network in the case where it does something shady.

    • Good backups are kind of difficult. For this reason I recommend many layers of redundancy both in terms of multiple copies of data and in terms of backup process. 3-2-1 is a good baseline where you have at least 3 copies of your data in at least 2 different mediums and at least 1 off-site. Your backups should be periodically tested by doing a mock restoration and checking the output for "correctness". This is a lot of work. But it is also the only way to properly do it without leaving responsibility for your data up to a third party that you almost certainly shouldn't trust with your security or even just not losing your data, eventually.

    For specific recs, I think the backup process is the most important. Anything that automatically syncs your phone photos to your own server and then makes multiple backups to multiple locations (including an encrypted copy in the cloud somewhere) is a good start. There are open source sync apps and servers, Nextcloud, Immich, etc that will automatically copy your files to your server. Then you should back up your photos using software intended for the purpose. Rsync, Borg, etc. I recommend storing a copy of your photos in a cloud service as well, like one of the many S3-compatible services out there, but only if you encrypt your data first. Borg and similar programs can make encrypted copies of your data that you can then safely upload to a cloud service.

  • so, im just technologically literate enough….

    I pay for two domains, both used for paid email for myself, and my kids to use. I use Workspaces. I also use Photos (last i checked i was tickling 1TB of photos, i pay for 2tb monthly). I average between 100-200 photos weekly, with probably 90% being photos of plumbing; new construction, reroutes, spot repairs, stuff for inspection, things found underground etc. Occasionally i take photos of plants/bugs and post them to /earth.

    I do not delete anything. Ever. Its saved my ass more times than i can count on my fingers and toes. Being able to geotag a photo with a physical address is priceless to me. I really like being able to pull up photos from 8-10 years ago, of plumbing i put in a wall, long since sheetrocked/painted and forgotten about, just by typing in the address of the house im working at. I am in this situation almost monthly.

    That said, does Ente have this capability? Just out of curiosity sake how TF do I transfer a TB of photos out of Photos and into Ente, were i to do so? Do i have to manually upload a photo each time i take one? Photos is more or less seamless in that regard. I understand Google is probably looking at my photos, but to be honest, its just photos of broken and repaired plumbing, with the occasional photo of human waste in some form due to my profession. Google wanna look at photos of poop? Be my guest, Google.

    I own an iphone but do not use apple for photo storage because im a new convert of sorts. I have only owned an iphone since 2022, whereas i owned an Android device since 2.0, donut.

    • Not the OP, but looked some things up because I was curious. Ente has a 2Tb storage option that costs $300/year or $30/mo; not sure how much you pay for that much storage in Google Photos. Their FAQ says they have an easy import process from Google Photos via Google Takeout (bulk download your data from all Google services). No idea if ente respects the geotags but I imagine they would (seems like an important feature for a Google photos killer).

      • Thanks for the info. Thats approx 2x what im paying currently for 2tb plus email (im using Google Business Standard plan) so if i were to switch, id also need to find a cheaper email host as well, otherwise id be paying for two services.

        In all likelihood im probably not the target market. It works, it works well enough, and i guess im entrenched enough that my momentum isnt going to cause me to leave.

    • I can't answer your Ente questions but I do recommend using a self-hosting strategy (with or without Ente) if it is within your skillset. The costs are your time and commodity hardware and cloud services. For example, if you just use a cloud service for backups, then the cost of storage will be something similar to Amazon Glacier (I use a different S3-compatible host). $4/TB/month to store, around $100/TB to download. You will presumably only download all of your (hopefully encrypted) photos when you need to test or restore the backups. There are also S3-compatible services that are cheaper than this, but this is a well-known one.

      Also, depending on how your photos have been organized, you may benefit from a deduping storage strategy that does incremental backups. If you used Borg or a similar piece of software, you would benefit cost-wise in two ways:

      1. It will dedupe at the beginning of the backup process. If you have 3 copies of the exact same video for whatever reason, it will realize this and only include the data once in the backup.

      2. Incremental backups will sometimes use a multi-file strategy that is efficient for efficient synchronization to other services. Basically, they sometimes store files or groups of files together more or less chronologically. When you then want to send the obfuscated backup data, you can use a sync program that tries to send only the backup files that have changed, which is usually a small minority of files. This is great for when you need to get that data back off the cloud to test backups. Rather than download 1 TB every time you can synchronize the data to a dedicated test volume on your own server where you always keep the last copy (so it can recognize and download only the changes).

  • Stop advertising your cloud platform that mines your data just as badly

  • I used Synology photos

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