Open source alternatives to Google Photos

What Google Photos does

Google Photos is Google’s service for backing up, organizing and sharing photos and videos, with apps for Android and iOS and a web version. It backs up the camera roll automatically in Original quality or in Storage saver, which compresses photos to 16 MP and videos to 1080p. Machine learning groups faces of people and pets, stacks similar shots, collects documents and screenshots into albums and builds memories, and search accepts natural-language queries. Photos and albums can be shared with anyone, including people without the app, and partner sharing gives a trusted contact access to your library. The whole library can be exported through Google Takeout.

Why people look for an alternative

• Storage counts against a shared quota. Since 1 June 2021, new uploads in Storage saver count toward the free 15 GB that Gmail, Drive and Photos share. Only items uploaded before that date, and those from Pixel 1 to 5 phones, are exempt. More space needs a paid Google One plan.
• Running out of space affects the whole account. When you are over quota, new photos stop backing up. Google says that if an account stays over quota for 2 years or more, all of its content may be removed, including Gmail and Drive.
• Inactivity. Google’s help pages warn that content may be deleted if you are inactive in Google Photos for 2 years or more.
• Data held by Google. Google says Photos content is not used for advertising, but users can choose to make Photos data available to other Google services that do support ads. Google does not say the library is end-to-end encrypted.
• Exports need reassembling. Takeout puts metadata such as dates and locations in separate JSON files, and importers have to match these back to each photo. PhotoPrism and Ente both document this step.

What to compare in an alternative

1. Automatic phone backup. An official mobile app that uploads in the background, or reliance on a third-party sync app.
2. Where the data lives and who can read it. Your own server, the developers’ cloud, and whether the library is encrypted end to end.
3. Search and organization. Face recognition, semantic search, maps and memories, and whether the machine learning runs on your server, on your devices or through an outside service.
4. Sharing. Shared albums, public links, partner sharing and accounts for family members.
5. Takeout import. Whether the importer reads the JSON metadata (dates, locations, descriptions) and recreates albums.
6. Cost of running it. RAM and CPU for machine learning, disk space for the originals, and a separate backup of the server itself.

Which one to choose

Immich comes closest to the Google Photos experience. It has native Android and iOS apps with background backup, a timeline, face grouping, smart search and partner sharing. It needs at least 6 GB of RAM; Takeout imports go through the community tool immich-go. Ente Photos is the choice if you care most about privacy: everything is encrypted end to end and machine learning runs on your devices. You can use its hosted service, which has a free tier, or self-host the server, and its desktop app imports Takeout archives. If you already run Nextcloud, Memories adds a fast timeline, maps and face tagging (through Nextcloud’s Recognize or Face Recognition apps), and the Nextcloud apps handle phone upload. PhotoPrism is a strong fit for browsing and searching a large existing archive and reads Takeout metadata, but phone backup depends on a third-party WebDAV app, and some features need a paid membership.