I wish Google Photos UI was better but it still seems to be the best solution. Hosting something like this seems like it would cost more time/money/frustration than its worth.
On the other hand, I always think its awesome to see self hosted solutions! It helps to create competition.
> Hosting something like this seems like it would cost more time/money/frustration than its worth.
If you've never self hosted anything there is indeed a large initial time and money investment. However, going through it once it pays itself off in the long run and adding additional services or maintaining existing ones becomes trivial.
Actually owning your data and having full control over it without worrying who it might be shared with or how it might be used is absolutely worth the hassle for some people.
I worry about catastrophic data loss. Even at Google scale you hear stories of things going wrong and they have to resort to off-site offline storage; for stuff like photos of my kids, I just don't trust myself, the SW provider, hardware etc to sufficiently insulate me from something crazy going wrong. It only needs to happen once.
About to have my first kid, have been thinking deeply about this and decided having my own storage server is the best route. ZFS raid with redundancy to survive 2 drive losses.
Will also backup offsite and take a manual snapshot each year for all my pics. Unlikely that I will backup the Plex-style media.
I am just as afraid of Google shutting off my account as I am about losing my own data.
I’ve been thinking about creating a service to back files up for 100+ years. I think s3 will be around that long, but the offering would need to survive the saas shutdown with a way to continue paying the bills. Could have an escrow fund to incentivize devs to maintain cloud storage integrations, with some sort of a voting mechanism for subscribers (crypto tokens for corp governance?)
Just putting a few half baked thoughts into the ether in case you find it interesting.
1. I use nextcloud to backup photos to my NAS
2. A nightly job backups my photos to Amazon Glacier (very cheap to store, very expensive to retrieve) - This is only in the case of a catastrophic failure (e.g. house burns down).
3. Every month or so I copy the photos to an external drive (manually)
I am thinking of buying a NAS that I can setup in my parents house so I can transfer them over there automatically instead of the manual copy action to the external drive
> I wish Google Photos UI was better but it still seems to be the best solution
Unless you have kids. [If you have kids Google is a no-go](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil...). Since becoming a dad I've finally started to untangle myself from Google. Only thing left is my android phone - seriously considering an alternative e.g. apple (but I wouldn't store pictures with them either)
I was expecting this to be Hacker News hyperbole but god that is TERRIFYING. Apple's CSAM plans were using a database of known images and got enough backlash, but Google trying to use AI to detect abuse? What a HORRIBLE idea.
On the other hand, I always think its awesome to see self hosted solutions! It helps to create competition.