Dump Google Photos: Switch to these self-hosted alternatives

With the advent of smartphones, photography has become extremely accessible to us. From selfies to capturing the grand and little moments of life, snapping no longer requires us to keep a DSLR at hand. But wait, did that lead to the overflowing of our gallery? * nods sheepishly *

Given the daily hustle-bustle, organising the gallery also becomes difficult for us. In such a scenario, automatic cloud storage like Google Photos is our real saviour! However, the tech juggernaut discontinued the "unlimited free" function on June 1, 2021. Instead, one is only allowed to upload 15GB worth of images to their storage space without incurring additional fees. 

Having said that, if you'd still prefer to store your images on a free, unlimited platform, we're here with some suggestions for self-hosted alternatives to Google Photos. Read along!

The best self-hosted alternatives to Google Photos

Nextcloud

You may host calendars, documents, and even contacts with Nextcloud. It has apps for practically anything you can imagine, including music players, office suites, video conferencing, and, of course, a photo gallery.

Photos are immediately transferred to the server using mobile clients available for iOS and Android, requiring no additional user input, and can be readily accessed either in the mobile app or through a website.

Since the majority of us are very concerned about protecting the privacy of our data, Nextcloud also provides the Privacy Center service. In addition to protected public sharing, Nextcloud offers server monitoring and account administration.

PiGallery 2

PiGallery 2 is a top-notch Android self-hosted software that was created to run on Raspberry Pi.

Simplicity and quickness are the key selling qualities of PiGallery 2. Your photo library will be accessible from any device's browser if you only point the software at the directory containing your images.

Subdirectories serve as albums in automated galleries. Every image may be found using keywords and full Boolean logic, such as date, location, and subject. As long as each gallery contains fewer than 5,000 individual photos, performance with picture collections of up to 100,000, is excellent.

PiGallery 2 is packed with fully customisable features.

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Lychee

The web-based photo hosting app– Lychee is free, user-friendly, and simple to set up. All of these actions can be carried out in your browser, including uploading, moving, renaming, describing, deleting, and searching your photos.

Lychee may also be operated on Docker, which makes the procedure much simpler because with only one click it can be installed on your server.

You may password-protect albums as well. You can use your keyboard to browse through your photographs or publicise them.

You can host both IPTC and EXIF metadata with Lychee. Additionally, you can import images from any convenient location, including your Dropbox account or your personal computer. The software lets you identify or designate images as ‘important’ in order to organise them better and avoid them from getting lost in your albums.

Piwigo

Among the numerous self-hosted photo backups available in the market, you can easily manage your images and movies with the help of Piwigo which is an open-source self-hosted app. You can use cloud hosting, take control, or host your data there.

Founded in France, Piwigo was created for people, teams, and organisations. Piwigo is a fantastic substitute if you are concerned about privacy while using Google Photos or other services.

The Piwigo photo management system provides a number of functions and precise controls.

Wrapping it up

With emerging tech trends, photography has become almost everyone’s hobby. By utilising these self-hosted photo apps, you can now go click click click! without worrying about your limited internal storage. Happy snapping!