Alternative to Google Photos

So I'm looking to disconnect myself from Google and their tracking (as much as possible) and I was thinking about installing GrapheneOS on my Pixel phone. I mostly use my phone for Lemmy, Signal, NewPipe and taking photos. The last one is my biggest bother at the moment. The Google Photos environment is so convenient - I take a photo, it uploads it to my Google Photos collection, and after a while, it deletes it from my phone to clear space, keeping only the cloud backup. Is there a functionality like this disconnected from Google that I would be able to implement on my GrapheneOS phone? I'm looking to invest in the Proton environment (mainly Mail and Drive) so I could use that for storage. Cheers

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Nextcloud, as mentioned, is a great option but does require a bit of work, albeit not much. I would recommend a Synology server. They're fantastically simple and this was my approach after trying Nextcloud. I did this to divorce myself from Google. Synology has many mirrored services
- But it's a more costly option correct? Because rather than using an old machine, I would have to purchase a $500+ machine from them.
  
  It is expensive but trust me Synology DSM is awesome and beatiful and it works really well.
  
  A single bay "J" model should be around $200 including a 4tb drive. You can achieve a lot with that, especially if your focus is automated photo backup

I've been using Immich. Very useful and easy for non techies to use. I know it says beta software, and it is; but it is more reliable than Lemmy...
- Are you using it with multiple users/devices syncing? I'm looking to get out of Photoprism, and Immich caught my eye a little while back.
- What's your hardware setup for this?
  
  VM on a Proxmox host, running Rocky Linux. 4G Ram, 2CPU, sshfs to NAS for picture storage.

it deletes it from my phone to clear space, keeping only the cloud backup
One copy of of anything isn't a backup, it's a move. Yes, in this case, Google is doing its own backups but you're giving them all the trust and control.

Immich! I've been using it for a while and it's amazing

I replaced Google Photos with a Synology NAS + Synology Moments (app). It handles the backup from my phone, organizes the images, has facial recognition, object recognition, etc. Object recognition was REMOVED from the newer Photos app, but Synology is apparently bringing that feature back this year.
You can clear up backed up photos from your phone through the Moments app (not sure about the other Photo apps from Synology), but you'll still want to have an actual backup solution for what's on your NAS.
- How much did you pay for your Synology setup? What is it? Do you have an offline backup?
  
  I've got the DS920+, and don't recall how much I paid for it as it was a few years ago. I've since upgraded the HDDs as my needs grow, and it's as easy as either adding a new one to an empty bay.
  I have several forms of backups, including a daily HDD connected to the NAS via USB, a monthly off site backup that's kept outside of my home, and cloud backups.
- Cheers for that. I've cut the cord from Google Photos without a solid replacement and it's been... pretty miserable tbh.
  I'll look into setting up a Synology NAS, as it seems to be a relatively inexpensive solution moving forward (Proton is nowhere near what I'm looking for feature-wise and other self-hosted foss solutions aren't really there yet afaict).
- Do you have an easy access to your Synology Moments library from outside of your home network?
  
  Yes, I've got it set up for both internal and external access.
  
  If you're paranoid about hackers like I am, you can set up a cert based VPN, lock down all ports, and use the VPN client to access your NAS from anywhere.
  Bonus if you have fiber, as upload to internet from home is as fast as download. That means fast download from your NAS.

If you can setup a small server (nothing fancy, an old refurbed office PC does just fine) you can setup NextCloud. I use it for a Google Drive/Photos replacement. Doesn't have as many nice features, but it works if al you want is archiving.
You can also check out the Self-Hosted Git Guide, there is a whole section for Photo/Video management. https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#photo-and-video-galleries
- Syncthing is another good option. I've never used NextCloud, though, so I'm not sure which is better.
  
  Syncthing is great if you wanna to sync everything inside a folder, i've used in the past to backup savefiles of drm free games, but for photos nextcloud is a better option since work almost the same as google photos auto finding the folder with images and asking kf you wanna to sync them instead of doing manually
- Is there a capability of having stuff on the cloud, but not locally, but they will still be accessible on the phone given the computer/server is on and that I'm online on my phone.
  EDIT: See if I had a half decent computer, but with a decent storage (let's say 1tb) and I had on all time - could I potentially use it as my own self hosted cloud?
  
  To your edit:
  Yes.
  
  Yes, i did with my old pc, i used zero tier one to connect with it from outside my wifi, sadly a storm came while i was at work and it fried the motherboard

Another vote for syncthing. It just magically works in the background and is very reliable. I take a photo on my phone and within seconds it's on my Photos library on my computer. (gThumb and/or Shotwell for Linux work well. )

Since we're discussing alternatives to Google, does anyone know of a self-hosted alternative to Google's location sharing? (For family members etc?)
- https://f-droid.org/en/packages/ca.cmetcalfe.locationshare/
  Seems to be working all right - give it a shot!
  EDIT: Apologies, missed the self hosted bit.
  EDIT2: Found this: https://fossdroid.com/a/hauk.html
  
  Oh nice thanks!
- I'm keeping my eyes on Locus: https://github.com/Myzel394/locus

I use Syncthing to get the photos and videos off our phones, and Photoprism as the photo library.
But I'm looking to see if there's a decent replacement for the latter, as the promised multi-user support that was eventually delivered was made a paid feature, without any acknowledgement for those of us that were paid up Github supporters up to that point.
- Yeah I looked at photo prism and felt odd at how many features I'd consider core were gated behind the paywall.
- This was exactly what I thought about doing, glad to know it works.

Apart from the ones mentioned there's also Murena cloud. Good if you have e/os phone
- Ooooooo I like the sound of this. What's the community's opinion on them when it comes to privacy? I don't mind paying a monthly fee if it's all taken care for me.
  
  from my very limited research, it's not the most private OS especially when compared to GrapheneOS. They do make it easier to switch to a de-Googled product with replacements out of the box. I do recall a lot of their other products like the Drive and what not are open source
  
  Imo its a very nice OS. Murena cloud is pretty private. You don't get much free space compared to Google tho.

I'm sorry for my rec since I'm not sure if it fits your needs or spec, but I use SyncThing which seems to support everything?
I'm also not sure since I don't use it, but you could theoretically get a tasker or automator setup to force SyncThing on Wi-Fi to your backup server and another/same one to delete them monthly/based on storage space?
It's not an all in one, as I don't believe SyncThing does transfers but makes copies? Unsure, this seems like it may be an option for you!
Bonus: if you have any kind of music collection that you like digitally, it makes it very easy to have an automated library :)
- It can definitely work! I use syncthing for my notes, music, photos, config files, and more, it's a lifesaver. I make sure all of my files make it to my desktop and keep it backed up.

This was one of my last de-googling projects, I currently self hosting photoprism, I have syncthing that syncs my photos to a network attached storage....at 3am it copies those pictures to a permanent location (I do 3am because during the day if you want to delete any photos etc. Before it syncs with photoprism.... At 4am my nas backs up to another nas (they are just a few portable HD for redundancy) photoprism works great for me, not as powerful as say Google photos, but close 2nd for me..... And for accessing the photos when not at home, have setup wireguard VPN for away from home access....... I see you want automatic deletion of the photos on your phone, I'd say you be able to run a CRON job that maybe every day (if you have made sure that your pictures are for sure being backed up in the middle of the night, that would automatically delete your dcim pictures folder..... I also run graphene, I'll give it a try and let you know if it works
P.s. my NAS drives are connected to a raspberry pi
- I tried to get Photoprism running on my unRAID server a while ago, but the setup was quite involved and I messed up a couple of steps. Ended up dusting off my old Synology DS412+ and running Moments on it. It's slow as hell (running on a 12 year old Atom processor and 4GB RAM) but it got me off of Google Photos.

Immich - GitHub

Ente.io is also an option

I'm using Synology photos. Auto backup for everyone's phones. Shared common library we move things into for all our photos. I miss some of the ai search capability of Google, but never enough to do anything but self host.
- Does this mean the Synology is exposed to the public internet?
  
  If you wish. You can set it up to only sync locally (intranet only) or you may expose it via DNS and port forwarding.
  
  Mine is only on my local network, but I am usually VPNed in anyway.

Nextcloud is good. I actually have an instance on my server if you need one. A+ rating on server security test lol

crypt.ee is a great alternative, which is extremely well designed. Included in the subscribtion is an online document editor for personal notes and documents. Everything fully encrypted of course & works across all platforms.

Checkout the "awesome self hosted" list at github.

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