Alternatives to Google Photos - Switching away from Google
2,369As I keep trying to find alternatives to Google Services, I think it's time to try and replace Google Photos. Here are a few services and ideas that might help you make the transition !
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Google Photos
Photos is a great service. It has unlimited storage for photos up to 16Mb and 1080p video, has great image detection and search with tags, you can create shared albums with other users, automatically upload everything you take to the cloud, and access your photos from any device. Google Photos can auto-enhance your pictures, create montages, and even suggest styling options.
If full HD resolution isn't enough for you, you can upload everything at its native resolution, in this case, you get 15Gb of storage, shared with your gmail, photos and drive account. This storage can be upgraded for 2$ a month for 100Gb, or even more.
All in all, Google Photos is a great option, inexpensive, available everywhere. The drawback is, as always, that Google's terms of service state that they can redistribute, modify, and generally use any of your content, even after you've stopped using the service.
EVER ALBUM
Ever Album is an encrypted solution to store, triage, and share your photos. It oofers unlimited high resolution photo storage, but doesn't support videos on its 7-day free trial. Their pretty costly 12$ a month premium plan does, though, giving you a free physical photo book as well and the access to a WIndows or Mac OS X only desktop client. The Windows client does not work with wine, so you're stuck on mobile if you're using Linux. Ever lives mainly on mobile though, with clients for Android and iOS.
THe app allows you to automatically send your pictures from your camera roll, but also pictures from Facebook, Instagram, Dropbox, or even Google Photos. It has easy sharing of albums and pictures with friends and family, even if they don't use Ever Album, although when I tried it, the link it generated for my album didn't seem to work.
IRISTA
Irista is Canon's photo storing service, which has the benefit of being made by a company whose sole business it allowing taking people to take pictures. It's pretty inexpensive as well, giving you 15gb for free, with unlimited resolution for your photos or videos. They do provide estimates for how may photos or videos each plan will allow you to store. You can upload to it from the web, your phone or tablet running iOS or Android, and even directly from your Canon DSLR. If you need more storage, 100gb will set you back 2$ a month.
Irista has a very nicely designed interface, with powerful editing tools which won't replace a photograph's suite of software but might help in a pinch, such as filters, adjusting the various parameters of your image, or changing its aspect ratio.
Albums need to be created manually, and can be shared easily, even with people not using Irista, even managing permissions to download photos or not. You can also build collaborative albums with other Irista users.
Finally, Irista allows you to order photo books, although they are a bit expensive, starting at around 36euros for a small square book.
Storage apps
If all you care about is backing up your photos and videos online, you can always use a dedicated storage app to sync your photos from your phone to your PC, such as Dropbox, or pCloud, but you won't get a web interface, any simple album organisation features, and no easy way to share albums to be viewed.
If you're on iOS, honestly, iCloud is your best option, even though the free storage is extremely limited, pricing is not that high, and it works seamlessly bewten your phone, the web iCloud interface, and maybe your other apple devices if you have any.
If you're using Linux, there are quite a big number of service providers. I personally use pCloud, which is inexpensive and works well, but the pick is yours.
Conclusion:
Oviously, this doesn't cover all available services out there. If you're looking for a more "private instagram feed between your friends", Cluster can do the trick perfectly, and if you're looking for some kind of photo-oriented wordpress, Piwigo is a great open source photo gallery app, allowing you to set permissions, customize your own photo gallery, and install plugins.
Personally, since I use a Samsung phone, and so do the people I want to share stuff with, I use its gallery application for shared albums and organization, and pCloud to sync the pictures to my desktop.
If I did have to pick one specific service, I'd go for Irista. Made by a company which loves photography, quite inexpensive, if you're not a heavy video user, it will probably be perfect.
Ever Album is a great option as well, with a well designed application, but it can be a bit expensive since it doesn't offer a free plan. Its photo books are a lot cheaper than Canon's ones though.