Please keep this type of updating going forward. Alot of creators touch it once and after the prototypical year passes and nothing exists they don't follow up as they already did once.
Just a little addition to this great video : I just migrated my photos from google to my external drive, it's made easy with their tool "takeout". Please keep in mind that if you want to "delete" your photos from there, you can only do it by batches of 500. And "delete" is in quotes because well, you have litterally no way of knowing if they are really deleted.
I don't think so; I just did exactly this like a week ago (total coincidence) and after I got my takeout, I was able to select more than 500 pics at a time and send them to the trash. I still only selected about 600 at a time because I read something somewhere about that 500 limit, and it took time to scroll down manually and shift-click to select a ton of photos at once (which you DO have to do btw, since unfortunately, selecting your first [most recent] photo, then dragging on the timeline-scroll-bar-thing on the right side of the page, teleporting back a few years and shift-clicking the very last photo, doesn't work for some reason to select them all. It just ends up with those 2 very first and last photos selected. Dunno why). So I didn't want to chance it and try selecting all 5000 or whatever I had before hitting delete, so I did also do it in batches - but my point is I think it is definitely possible to select >500 at a time, as long as you scroll somewhat slowly/manually, just using your scroll wheel or 2-finger touchpad scroll at a regular speed, not smashing Page Down or End or anything like that. As long as you do that and let each new page of older photos start the "loading" animation, it'll allow you to shift-click select an arbitrary amount of photos, as far as I can tell. Took me just a few minutes to delete them all.
They're not instantly deleted, they may hold onto a copy of the photo for bandwidth/storage reasons (i.e. if you reupload it/if other users have uploaded the same photo). According to their TOS (may wanna make sure) I believe it said when you delete your photo, you pull your rights with it (they lose their "license" to use your photo).
I’ve switched from Google Photos (and Drive) to Mega. It supports Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and IOS. it’s open source and encrypted they give you your encryption key. They also have a sync service to syncs your files to Mega, I got my college folder to sync with Mega college folder and my Photos are sync with my Mega
I'm using a self hosted solution on my home NAS (a cheap synology device, with two storage bays). It's easy to use, and it works pretty well. Synology Moments has some advanced features similar to Google Photos. Unfortunately the problem for me is extracting my pictures from Google Photos while retaining the pictures metadata and uploading them back on the NAS without them showing up as shot the day they were uploaded. For me the problem of choosing a solution like iCloud or Google Photos is the way you're locked in, and the fact that you're not easily able to migrate your pictures wherever and whenever you want.
+The Linux Experiment Here's something you might have not considered: Decentralized, cryptographically-secure storage with technologies such as Sia or FileCoin. This gives you 100% free control over your storage - not even the host of the files can acess them, you can end and start storage contracts whenever you want, there's always-updating ranking of storage hosts, it's MUCH less expensive than any of the storage services of the various big companies, and it's even MORE secure.
You can get a QNAP NAS cheap-ish from ebay ($100-200) and a few HDDs of your choice and then use QSync - Google Drive replacement for a one time cost of $200-400 (depends on the NAS model and size of HDDs) with so so so much more storage space. QSync is available for Windows, MacOS, and most importantly Linux - also Qfile, the Android equivelant. There's also other apps I haven't tried for backuping up data from your phone. Only recurring cost is electricity, about the same as a desktop computer. The NAS will email you alerts if a HDD dies, and I recommend you buy a spare to keep on hand for such an event.
I did a take out from google photos and put everything on a 1 TB external SSD and called it a day. I have a 512GB sd card on my phone and that I trasnfer my stuff from to the ssd every now and then. I'll be getting another external SSD for back up. That's another option.
Thank you! Your videos inspired me te move from Google as well. I moved Google Photos to NextCloud. But I did not stop there! I also moved my contacts, calendar and Whatsapp backup to my NextCloud server. I only needed 2 Android apps to keep those in sync on my phone, which took about 7 Euros. Adding to the fun, Gnome has support for NextCloud in the Online Accounts settings so Evolution has my calendar and contacts as well.
I have been really happy with Synology Moments. If you own a Synology NAS it's just great, it categories your pictures, detects faces, and can work completely isolated from the web. Uploading takes place through just putting files on a folder in my NAS or their phone app, which is also nice to use. And Synology's Webinterface is VERY easy to use, i would trust most people I know to set-up a NAS up on their own. Only downside is the cost of a Synology NAS and the drives (+ you have to deal with backup on your own).
For those who are pissed off only because of the end of free unlimited storage and don’t have many privacy issues or isn’t an privacy enthusiast, I switched from it to Yandex Disk (from Russia), which offers unlimited photo storage at a spend of showing you ads on the app (and I didn’t find them so intrusive as, for instance, the Grindr app). I plan to sync photos only for now on, for the ones already on Google Photos, since the old ones will not count for the quota until 1st of June, I plan to let them there.
Damn am I glad I subbed to your channel! Now I have the perfect excuse to build a Linux server! Your plan is actually brilliant for budget conscious builders as slightly older components are cheaper than newer ones, especially specified server components like Xeon CPUs and mothboards depending on the capacity (size and number of drives) you want/need to host - for what purpose. The drives don't have to be exceptionally fast and HDDs would be more cost effective and longer lasting than SSDs in the long run. If I remember correctly you don't necessarily need any other peripherals as you will basically access those files stored on the server from your desktop/laptop either through wifi or ethernet. No need for a monitor, mouse and keyboard unless you really want them. A decent, efficient and reliable PS, good server OS with a LAN/WAN package and you're good to go! Simple servers are much easier/cheaper to build than your average AAA gaming desktop OR buy a good, older, used business desktop and weak it into a dedicated server (a couple terabyte HDDs, extra RAM, server OS...).
My favorite is pCloud. It's a one-time lifetime purchase for 500GB-2TB of Swiss-encrypted cloud storage, it can auto sync desktop folders and handle backups, it has an auto-upload feature on mobile for all your photos and videos, it has a built in mediaplayer for any music or videos you put on there (though it's not every good at recognizing and sorting music by it's metadata yet), and it even has a way to set up folder sharing and 'custom links' that you can design to match your portfolio if you're a creative type and sharing files with a client, say, and want a consistent look across all your products and services. Pretty much all it's missing is the AI auto-tagging thing you mention for google photos, but honestly that's pretty creepy... I would probably disable that feature if pCloud started offering it.
Yeah and I hate that the more you take photos, the more you pay. I get it but painful. Never going to get me to pay every month just to keep my photos stored. Current plan is to migrate to Phostow.
NextCloud is super slow for photos and videos, and does not show previews for videos. Basically just useful for backing up photos from your mobile phone to your home server. Then you will have to view it on the home server to get any decent speed
There’s also pCloud. They offer 2 tb for around $500 one time purchase. And they have an integrated Linux, iOS abd windows app. They also offer an encryption plan where all your data on their cloud is encrypted. To me $20 a month for a linode with only 80 Gigs is really expensive ... that wouldn’t even hold all my photos haha. 😅
one reason not to use Amazon is because you can't have multiple users. so if you're sharing with your family, all of your photos will merge into the same place
Manual installation on ubuntu is no different other than the command you type (sudo apt install [insert app here]). I don't use snaps because it's almost like the apps run in a VM or something, when I run one for instance, my theme doesn't carry over and even my mouse pointer changes when I hover in and out of a snap window, driving me insane. Yes it's a convenient install but I want packages fully installed and working with my config 100%. And don't skip on configuration either, take the time, go through all the options your server app has, and set your server up the way you want so it can suit your needs the best it can! 1 thing in regards to privacy, if the server app isn't asking you to setup port-forwarding on your home network, it likely could be communicating with a 3rd party server in order to establish a connection, and a route through you firewall, that would otherwise block it (this is one way bittorrent clients work with trackers so peers can connect to you, and how you IoT stuff works (so you can start a load of clothes while you're at Walmart for some reason) This is also a reason xbox and ps players like to enable port-forwarding on some ports to their consoles (so i.e. Call of Duty is more likely to pick them as a host for an online team deathmatch). I did a little setup with my setup, lol. Buy yourself an old computer for $5-$50, depending on the machine, or ask your neighbors if they have old computer junk to get rid of, and some harddrives for storage.* Ok, let's get technical, muhahahaha! Install FreeBSD on your server, get a bunch of harddrives, set them up as a mirroring zraid under zfs for redundancy (each pair will back each other up), enable port forwarding on your network for any port, set sshd to use that port, setup users, sshd (i.e. default directory for a certain user, sftp only, etc.), security, install bash and rsync on server, termux on Android, rsync in termux, tasker for Android, write a few bash scripts etc. With that, you have my setup but it wasn't all done in a day or overnight, I developed my setup over 4 or 5 years as I was attending college, and I am very technical, lol. Also if you're gonna setup a server like me, you're not gonna just set it up for photos, (what a waste)... My server is a file/web server (essentially they're the same thing just different protocols and a few securities and nuances)... anyway, I am one of those who doesn't like things done for me, I wanna set it up myself so I have full control over it and it only does what I want. An easy setup is basically enable sshd if it isn't enabled, make a standard non privledged user on your server, enable port forwarding,** (optional) make an empty directory and set your client/file browser to go there when you log in, and (optional) install rsync on both devices. On Android, use any file manager that supports sftp (ftp over ssh) and if not using rsync, copy over the contents of the DCIM folder, doing so regularly to keep it backed up. *If you do the math, even an 8TB harddisk will pay for itself within a year when compared to an equivalent size monthly subscription. **ssh default port is 22, I don't use defaults for a reason, you can edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config to change it or when you setup port forwarding you can have a different port forwarded to that port at your server's internal ip address, when you're on the go, use the outside port, other at home on home wifi.
Nick, I haven't started the video yet but I wanted to talk about this. I use Google photos for 2 things : Free storage (not anymore) Photo search (the topic) So what I wanna ask you is that is there an alternative to search feature of Google photos? Can we implement its search feature anywhere we like? For example : if I make my own personal online storage for only photos with a 1 TB hardisk, can I somehow get that google photo search in there or any competent search that returns extremely relavant results? I never cared about the service and I am sure if people are able to implement that awesome search ability to their personal storage too, we don't even need alternatives (I guess) If I wasn't very clear about my question, please let me know, I really care about a proper answer for that. Will resume from linode ad now :) Thank you.
@@TheLinuxEXP I see. 😔 I was looking for ways to manually setup something from scratch since google documents a lot of their research and make them public, and I maybe thought this could be useful in some way ( not very knowledgeable in programming so I can't determine) developers.google.com/photos/library/reference/rest/v1/mediaItems/search
Whoa Whoa ,slow didn't there Mr Linux Guru,the new dudes like myself are now googling everything you said coz you just fried our brains!! Say what easy???yikes, there goes my next month trying to figure this out!! But Brilliant Content from Nick!!!
Just want to add, I tried Nextcloud and was not satisfied with performance (hosted in Germany by a third party) and price per storage space. If you don't host own Nextcloud, then a third party is expensive compared to Google Photos and so on. pCloud have servers in EU, and price per storage is great. But I guess it all depends on your workflow: I take photos on mobile and want them off-loaded from my phone daily and stored into the cloud and backed up to external storage. I don't often revisit my photos.
Thank you for this video. Excellent video. I understand this is an old video, but the explanation of what NextCloud is really is excellent. Now to decide to host it at home or to have it hosted. Thanks again!
Completely switched from Google Photos to Microsoft OneDrive. I got 1 TB storage with Microsoft 365, so that is plenty of photo storage for me. The privacy, however, remains questionable.
I skipped straight to the Nextcloud section. Would like to add that Synology seems to be becoming a very popular option for NAS, though I'm not sure whether it's FOSS.
It would be very interesting to see how the nextcloud solution looks like on the mobile app side. Can you have access to some kind of gallery view ? Or does it work only in a folder>file way ? Are there any plans from the devs to get a gallery app working with nextcloud ? Thanks for the great content !
I've been using MEGA as a replacement for Google Drive, and from what I can tell, it's pretty reliable. I think most if not all of it is open source as well.* Edit: *You can see the source code, but it's not necessarily open source.
So you can make sure it is secure, but you cannot fork or self-host it. Web client license (short and simple): github.com/meganz/webclient/blob/master/LICENCE.md
$20 for 80GB for self-hosted. Let that sink in. I understand that is the only way to be private, but that price is unreasonable for such little storage.
And again, just like in your last year's video, you missed to mention Yandex Drive which offers unlimited original size uploads straight from the Phone (not from PC). I think it is worth being mentioned.
@@BlobBlobkins I thought the point here was to provide an objective list of services which offer some functionality for the end consumer, not be politically biased, especially on grounds which only proves that Google is just as bad.
@@5koKirilov Yeah. But my reason to quit google is for privacy reasons. If you use government software, I don't think it will help in my case. But you are right.
@@BlobBlobkins He also pointed out Amazon and that's just as bad as Google so I don't think the political point here stands. Plus, if you only use the Yandex Disc than they will have as much info about you as OneDrive would. Plus, Yandex is an independent business and Putin has no interest in baking it go bankrupt as Russia would lose because of it and then have to rely on Google.
Dropbox is nice and it has been a great tool in my toolset but its free tier is severely limited for storage of photos and videos. My daughters alone would easily consume those 2 GB in about a month or two with their selfies and whatnot!
I don't know this is not at all helpful to me. Because it is neither the money nor the storage space. I will switch to any Google photos alternative if it can do one thing besides syncing that is scraping text from photos. If there such service that does flawlessly then I will try it out. Onedrive is the best one at this from my experience. They are not that good with Contextual search but definitely miles ahead of Google for text OCR. But organisation of photos is bad and onedrive only works for one way sync on phones. 🤦🏻♂️If I delete a pic on my phone I want it to be deleted from the cloud as well after 60 days from the bin. Onedrive just keeps cluttering the photos. Sometimes there are number of screenshots for research purposes for short time only after I use them I want to dispose them off but can't do it because onedrive doesn't sync the deletions from gallery. 😒
Self hosting is the way... unless you live in the middle of nowhere you probably have unlimited internet data (home), tools like Nextcloud to setup your private e-mail and photo hosting are EASY to install, use and maintain and you don't need anything more than a old laptop or Raspberry Pi which is tiny, silent, cheap and you will not even notice running it on your electricity bill.
thank you for the info one question, is prime photos "more reliable" than google photos? in therms of privacy or security. checking the other alternatives
@@13shubh i know that but there servers are located in japan and hong kong out side from china so i think thats. Pretty good. If u relay on google, facebook, apple ammazon so there is not a such bad thing to believe in this company. And i dont need any suggestions from indians.
I just want to know how's the mega.nz They are giving 50gb free storage which is enough for my photos and files. They claimed to have privacy and security.
No syncthing? It's not cloud, sure, but for backup it's dead simple and reliable. Just make sure both devices are on, and it'll sync and it'll backup to all your devices. I use it primarily for my work documents on my personal laptop, desktop, and work laptop (that I'm essentially using as OneDrive server because it's not good enough for anything else).
Hey ! Your linode link doesn't work (the characters %E2%80%8B are automatically added in the URL for some reason) And btw I found linode is really expensive (for shared compute, else I don't know the real price)
I stopped using google photos because It doesn't have random slideshow feature. I'm using app called simple gallery. It was cheap and It's offline. It has random slideshow feature. that's exactly what I wanted!
@@uzefulvideos3440 I wasn't aware of it. I have it since...well , i can't remember actually, but more than five years for sure and it's still 50 GB. Well, i think 15 GB free is still more than what others offers for their free account. Not huge, but definitely enough for pictures storage.
@@DanieleElaborati Yes, when I got my account I also still got the full 50GB. I think they had to change their model because of all the people creating many free accounts to host pirated movies.
@11:21 According to Techhut, the Nextcloud Snap package has significantly poorer performance than a raw install straight to the server. Just throwing that out there
Why don't you use a Nextcloud minimal requirements Linode + Wasabi? You can get 1TB of storage for 5.99$ a month instead of paying that much for the 80GB Linode. 😁
I'm wanting to do the same thing you did. How do you connect Wasabi to Photoprism? I'm still working on figuring out on my own, but in the meantime I'm going to keep working on it.
Hi, thanks a million for your advice. a couple of questions, if I may: 1. for storing my photos, I currently use my own nas (no external access, only within the local network). what do you use for light photo manipulation? GIMP is too hard, something light and easy-to-use (brightness, some filters, crop, etc...)? 2. To manage calendar and contact, I'm wondering to use nextcloud on external provider but I have some privacy concern. can the external provider access to my data? or nextcloud is bullet-proof even if hosted on an external provider? thanks. S.
Hi Salvatore, You might want to look at Darktable for image manipulation. Also Gimp really is not that hard, just a bit of a learning curve. 2. Depends on the provider I'd say. And NOTHING is ever bullet proof. For secure contacts and calendar syncing Proton has these features added by now I believe. And else there is always Etesync
@@dutchbachelor thanks. Yep I started using Proton also for calendar but not for contacts (I need something to sync my address book also on my phone,). It's a never ending story I guess, will see...
Does anyone know how much system resources Nextcloud needs? I have an old laptop that could maybe become a nice home server. I don't think I need to sync stuff away from my home wifi.
@@uzefulvideos3440 aren't all google services end-to-end encrypted? except that google can use your photo once it arrives on their end in MEGA's case once photo or file arrives at their storage can they see it for "development" purposes?
@@Funkfreed If a picture is uploaded to Google Photos the data stream is encrypted, but Google has a copy of the key on their servers, which means Google has access to your unencrypted photos once they are on their servers. End-to-end encryption means that the data not only always stays encrypted, but that you own the key and the service provider doesn't. You can still share end-to-end encrypted files, the link will just be longer because it also has to include the key.
can you make a video to explain how distros based on other distros work. what's the differences, what's same, why choose a derived distro over the original and such.
@the linux experiment what about librephotos and photoprism? both of them got an searching alghorithm like google photos. got them as dockers and they do their job pretty well. unfortunately for photoprism is the single user. you need more than one docker container if you want to manage multiple users. but thats a plus for librephotos
Personally I'm going to be using mega.nz for everything in the near future. Super secure, all encrypted files via a no-trust policy akin to password managers. Storage is pretty cheap. They also have a nice cli for integrating things e.g. backups from my server running stuff like rss
I can understand the concerns of privacy, but is Google really authorised to use the photos for anything out of labelling the photos for us? Is there any source for this claim? (I'm not asking if they might or if they do, but if there's any piece of agreement that clearly says we are allowing them to do that, I never heard anything about that)
The license you give Google to use your photos is very explicit and nothing like what you said - it's really a shame you started spreading FUD. True that Google are allowed to analyze your photos, both for information presented to you and for improving ML algorithms, but they definitely can't do with them what they want - they can't publish them anywhere (except as per your instructions, such as when sharing) or share them out any metadata with any 3rd party.
I just re-reviewed the license terms fit Google (policies.google.com/terms?hl=en-US#toc-content) and Apple (www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/icloud/en/terms.html). The main difference is that Google's T&C have you allow Google to use your client for "developing new technologies and services for Google consistent with these terms" (emphasis theres), while Apple's have no such language. You also mentioned some kind of track record that Google have for not keeping guess privacy, which I find weird - I've been following the tech world (and working in it) for most of my adult life and the only actual case that I can relate your comments to is the Google assistant recordings bang analyzed by a Google 3rd party service provider - and both Amazon and Apple have been caught doing the same thing.
The terms explained here are consistent with what I said. Google can use your photos to develop new features and products. I personally think that’s a problem. If you don’t, that’s ok :)
@@letsgocamping88 I'm ok with this. I think it's weird that people care so much that some machines are crunching the pictures of their cats, a bit "too much". This is basically what this is about.
Please keep this type of updating going forward. Alot of creators touch it once and after the prototypical year passes and nothing exists they don't follow up as they already did once.
I try to revisit stuff that hasn’t aged well :)
Just a little addition to this great video :
I just migrated my photos from google to my external drive, it's made easy with their tool "takeout".
Please keep in mind that if you want to "delete" your photos from there, you can only do it by batches of 500.
And "delete" is in quotes because well, you have litterally no way of knowing if they are really deleted.
I don't think so; I just did exactly this like a week ago (total coincidence) and after I got my takeout, I was able to select more than 500 pics at a time and send them to the trash. I still only selected about 600 at a time because I read something somewhere about that 500 limit, and it took time to scroll down manually and shift-click to select a ton of photos at once (which you DO have to do btw, since unfortunately, selecting your first [most recent] photo, then dragging on the timeline-scroll-bar-thing on the right side of the page, teleporting back a few years and shift-clicking the very last photo, doesn't work for some reason to select them all. It just ends up with those 2 very first and last photos selected. Dunno why). So I didn't want to chance it and try selecting all 5000 or whatever I had before hitting delete, so I did also do it in batches - but my point is I think it is definitely possible to select >500 at a time, as long as you scroll somewhat slowly/manually, just using your scroll wheel or 2-finger touchpad scroll at a regular speed, not smashing Page Down or End or anything like that. As long as you do that and let each new page of older photos start the "loading" animation, it'll allow you to shift-click select an arbitrary amount of photos, as far as I can tell. Took me just a few minutes to delete them all.
If you save the link to the photo then delete, the link still works
They're not instantly deleted, they may hold onto a copy of the photo for bandwidth/storage reasons (i.e. if you reupload it/if other users have uploaded the same photo). According to their TOS (may wanna make sure) I believe it said when you delete your photo, you pull your rights with it (they lose their "license" to use your photo).
I’ve switched from Google Photos (and Drive) to Mega. It supports Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and IOS. it’s open source and encrypted they give you your encryption key. They also have a sync service to syncs your files to Mega, I got my college folder to sync with Mega college folder and my Photos are sync with my Mega
Rewatched the original just a few minutes ago. Perfect coincidence.
Nice :)
That's not coincidence it's Google algorithm 🤣
@@mithranpit's always watching. Helped in my research all the same 👍
photopism and librephotos are really good self-hosted options and they have the same search capabilities like google photos with ml and ai
I'm using a self hosted solution on my home NAS (a cheap synology device, with two storage bays). It's easy to use, and it works pretty well. Synology Moments has some advanced features similar to Google Photos. Unfortunately the problem for me is extracting my pictures from Google Photos while retaining the pictures metadata and uploading them back on the NAS without them showing up as shot the day they were uploaded. For me the problem of choosing a solution like iCloud or Google Photos is the way you're locked in, and the fact that you're not easily able to migrate your pictures wherever and whenever you want.
+The Linux Experiment
Here's something you might have not considered:
Decentralized, cryptographically-secure storage with technologies such as Sia or FileCoin.
This gives you 100% free control over your storage - not even the host of the files can acess them, you can end and start storage contracts whenever you want, there's always-updating ranking of storage hosts, it's MUCH less expensive than any of the storage services of the various big companies, and it's even MORE secure.
You can get a QNAP NAS cheap-ish from ebay ($100-200) and a few HDDs of your choice and then use QSync - Google Drive replacement for a one time cost of $200-400 (depends on the NAS model and size of HDDs) with so so so much more storage space. QSync is available for Windows, MacOS, and most importantly Linux - also Qfile, the Android equivelant. There's also other apps I haven't tried for backuping up data from your phone.
Only recurring cost is electricity, about the same as a desktop computer. The NAS will email you alerts if a HDD dies, and I recommend you buy a spare to keep on hand for such an event.
Sure this is a good solution and long term investment but might be less straightforward for average Joe 😀
I did a take out from google photos and put everything on a 1 TB external SSD and called it a day. I have a 512GB sd card on my phone and that I trasnfer my stuff from to the ssd every now and then. I'll be getting another external SSD for back up. That's another option.
Yeah great shout - you should combine that with Phostow
Thank you! Your videos inspired me te move from Google as well. I moved Google Photos to NextCloud. But I did not stop there! I also moved my contacts, calendar and Whatsapp backup to my NextCloud server. I only needed 2 Android apps to keep those in sync on my phone, which took about 7 Euros. Adding to the fun, Gnome has support for NextCloud in the Online Accounts settings so Evolution has my calendar and contacts as well.
Nice !
I have been really happy with Synology Moments. If you own a Synology NAS it's just great, it categories your pictures, detects faces, and can work completely isolated from the web. Uploading takes place through just putting files on a folder in my NAS or their phone app, which is also nice to use. And Synology's Webinterface is VERY easy to use, i would trust most people I know to set-up a NAS up on their own. Only downside is the cost of a Synology NAS and the drives (+ you have to deal with backup on your own).
For those who are pissed off only because of the end of free unlimited storage and don’t have many privacy issues or isn’t an privacy enthusiast, I switched from it to Yandex Disk (from Russia), which offers unlimited photo storage at a spend of showing you ads on the app (and I didn’t find them so intrusive as, for instance, the Grindr app). I plan to sync photos only for now on, for the ones already on Google Photos, since the old ones will not count for the quota until 1st of June, I plan to let them there.
Damn am I glad I subbed to your channel! Now I have the perfect excuse to build a Linux server! Your plan is actually brilliant for budget conscious builders as slightly older components are cheaper than newer ones, especially specified server components like Xeon CPUs and mothboards depending on the capacity (size and number of drives) you want/need to host - for what purpose. The drives don't have to be exceptionally fast and HDDs would be more cost effective and longer lasting than SSDs in the long run. If I remember correctly you don't necessarily need any other peripherals as you will basically access those files stored on the server from your desktop/laptop either through wifi or ethernet. No need for a monitor, mouse and keyboard unless you really want them. A decent, efficient and reliable PS, good server OS with a LAN/WAN package and you're good to go! Simple servers are much easier/cheaper to build than your average AAA gaming desktop OR buy a good, older, used business desktop and weak it into a dedicated server (a couple terabyte HDDs, extra RAM, server OS...).
My favorite is pCloud. It's a one-time lifetime purchase for 500GB-2TB of Swiss-encrypted cloud storage, it can auto sync desktop folders and handle backups, it has an auto-upload feature on mobile for all your photos and videos, it has a built in mediaplayer for any music or videos you put on there (though it's not every good at recognizing and sorting music by it's metadata yet), and it even has a way to set up folder sharing and 'custom links' that you can design to match your portfolio if you're a creative type and sharing files with a client, say, and want a consistent look across all your products and services. Pretty much all it's missing is the AI auto-tagging thing you mention for google photos, but honestly that's pretty creepy... I would probably disable that feature if pCloud started offering it.
20$ a month for 80GB .. that’s pretty steep. 😅
Google Photos is only 20$ yearly for 100 GB.
Yeah and I hate that the more you take photos, the more you pay. I get it but painful. Never going to get me to pay every month just to keep my photos stored. Current plan is to migrate to Phostow.
NextCloud is super slow for photos and videos, and does not show previews for videos. Basically just useful for backing up photos from your mobile phone to your home server. Then you will have to view it on the home server to get any decent speed
There’s also pCloud. They offer 2 tb for around $500 one time purchase. And they have an integrated Linux, iOS abd windows app. They also offer an encryption plan where all your data on their cloud is encrypted. To me $20 a month for a linode with only 80 Gigs is really expensive ... that wouldn’t even hold all my photos haha. 😅
pCloud is pretty good, that’s what I used to use before
one reason not to use Amazon is because you can't have multiple users. so if you're sharing with your family, all of your photos will merge into the same place
Manual installation on ubuntu is no different other than the command you type (sudo apt install [insert app here]). I don't use snaps because it's almost like the apps run in a VM or something, when I run one for instance, my theme doesn't carry over and even my mouse pointer changes when I hover in and out of a snap window, driving me insane. Yes it's a convenient install but I want packages fully installed and working with my config 100%. And don't skip on configuration either, take the time, go through all the options your server app has, and set your server up the way you want so it can suit your needs the best it can!
1 thing in regards to privacy, if the server app isn't asking you to setup port-forwarding on your home network, it likely could be communicating with a 3rd party server in order to establish a connection, and a route through you firewall, that would otherwise block it (this is one way bittorrent clients work with trackers so peers can connect to you, and how you IoT stuff works (so you can start a load of clothes while you're at Walmart for some reason) This is also a reason xbox and ps players like to enable port-forwarding on some ports to their consoles (so i.e. Call of Duty is more likely to pick them as a host for an online team deathmatch).
I did a little setup with my setup, lol. Buy yourself an old computer for $5-$50, depending on the machine, or ask your neighbors if they have old computer junk to get rid of, and some harddrives for storage.* Ok, let's get technical, muhahahaha! Install FreeBSD on your server, get a bunch of harddrives, set them up as a mirroring zraid under zfs for redundancy (each pair will back each other up), enable port forwarding on your network for any port, set sshd to use that port, setup users, sshd (i.e. default directory for a certain user, sftp only, etc.), security, install bash and rsync on server, termux on Android, rsync in termux, tasker for Android, write a few bash scripts etc. With that, you have my setup but it wasn't all done in a day or overnight, I developed my setup over 4 or 5 years as I was attending college, and I am very technical, lol. Also if you're gonna setup a server like me, you're not gonna just set it up for photos, (what a waste)... My server is a file/web server (essentially they're the same thing just different protocols and a few securities and nuances)... anyway, I am one of those who doesn't like things done for me, I wanna set it up myself so I have full control over it and it only does what I want.
An easy setup is basically enable sshd if it isn't enabled, make a standard non privledged user on your server, enable port forwarding,** (optional) make an empty directory and set your client/file browser to go there when you log in, and (optional) install rsync on both devices. On Android, use any file manager that supports sftp (ftp over ssh) and if not using rsync, copy over the contents of the DCIM folder, doing so regularly to keep it backed up.
*If you do the math, even an 8TB harddisk will pay for itself within a year when compared to an equivalent size monthly subscription.
**ssh default port is 22, I don't use defaults for a reason, you can edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config to change it or when you setup port forwarding you can have a different port forwarded to that port at your server's internal ip address, when you're on the go, use the outside port, other at home on home wifi.
As the dev of LibrePhotos: We have face recognition, scene recognition and will add soon object recognition. You can search via these terms.
Nice!
LibrePhotos? I searched it and nothing came up.
@@billgross3579 It's on github :)
I always thought, before watching this, that Google Photos was just another regular image viewing app.
This channel is getting big! You're doing everything perfectly, Nick.
Keep on the good work!
Greetings from Brazil 😁
Thanks a lot :) I’m thrilled with how the channel is growing !!
Thank you, Nick. Longevity is always an issue.
Yeah, that was the problem with the first video, none of the services still exist
The paint job on the cabinet is hurting my soul.
He definitely should have clean it. But let us not pretend as if it was unusual. It just looks bad on camera, because of the focus.
It needs a second coat, yeah 😅
@@thingsiplay clean? that's not dirt, jackass. it was kinda painted in all directions
Nick, send us that picture with a tiger wearing sunglasses 😂😂
Hahaha no that’s mine !
Nick, I haven't started the video yet but I wanted to talk about this.
I use Google photos for 2 things :
Free storage (not anymore)
Photo search (the topic)
So what I wanna ask you is that is there an alternative to search feature of Google photos?
Can we implement its search feature anywhere we like?
For example : if I make my own personal online storage for only photos with a 1 TB hardisk, can I somehow get that google photo search in there or any competent search that returns extremely relavant results?
I never cared about the service and I am sure if people are able to implement that awesome search ability to their personal storage too, we don't even need alternatives (I guess)
If I wasn't very clear about my question, please let me know, I really care about a proper answer for that.
Will resume from linode ad now :)
Thank you.
I don’t think that’s possible, unfortunately!
@@TheLinuxEXP I see. 😔
I was looking for ways to manually setup something from scratch since google documents a lot of their research and make them public, and I maybe thought this could be useful in some way ( not very knowledgeable in programming so I can't determine)
developers.google.com/photos/library/reference/rest/v1/mediaItems/search
Whoa Whoa ,slow didn't there Mr Linux Guru,the new dudes like myself are now googling everything you said coz you just fried our brains!! Say what easy???yikes, there goes my next month trying to figure this out!! But Brilliant Content from Nick!!!
you can use rclone to "sync" between a local machine and some cloud providers
Plus rclone allows you to set up encrypted repositories so that it will transparently encrypt your data while in traffic to rest on the cloud server.
Just want to add, I tried Nextcloud and was not satisfied with performance (hosted in Germany by a third party) and price per storage space. If you don't host own Nextcloud, then a third party is expensive compared to Google Photos and so on. pCloud have servers in EU, and price per storage is great. But I guess it all depends on your workflow: I take photos on mobile and want them off-loaded from my phone daily and stored into the cloud and backed up to external storage. I don't often revisit my photos.
Yeah, hosting in the cloud can be expensive
Thank you for this video. Excellent video. I understand this is an old video, but the explanation of what NextCloud is really is excellent. Now to decide to host it at home or to have it hosted. Thanks again!
Completely switched from Google Photos to Microsoft OneDrive. I got 1 TB storage with Microsoft 365, so that is plenty of photo storage for me.
The privacy, however, remains questionable.
Or non existing.. Instead of Google mining your data it is Microsoft now.
I skipped straight to the Nextcloud section. Would like to add that Synology seems to be becoming a very popular option for NAS, though I'm not sure whether it's FOSS.
True! Not sure about it’s FOSS status either!
Yandex drive gives same functionality as Google but still free with no limit for photos. 100 gb extra will cost you 10 euro per year
Another self-hosting option is a Synology NAS.
It would be very interesting to see how the nextcloud solution looks like on the mobile app side. Can you have access to some kind of gallery view ? Or does it work only in a folder>file way ? Are there any plans from the devs to get a gallery app working with nextcloud ? Thanks for the great content !
It works in a folder file way, but there is no gallery.
Thank you ! Let's hope that it's in the team's projects 🤗
I've been using MEGA as a replacement for Google Drive, and from what I can tell, it's pretty reliable. I think most if not all of it is open source as well.*
Edit: *You can see the source code, but it's not necessarily open source.
The backend is closed source and the clients have a special license which allows you to only review the code, but not modify it, etc.
So you can make sure it is secure, but you cannot fork or self-host it.
Web client license (short and simple): github.com/meganz/webclient/blob/master/LICENCE.md
@@Grejtcz Ah, I see. I'm still pretty new to open source stuff since I just started learning about it last year.
@@ToxicTwisterC That license is what would be described as Source Available, but not Open Source.
@@sentinel9651 oh ok
Unfortunately I can't use Amazon either, as I have privacy to lose.
$20 for 80GB for self-hosted. Let that sink in. I understand that is the only way to be private, but that price is unreasonable for such little storage.
And again, just like in your last year's video, you missed to mention Yandex Drive which offers unlimited original size uploads straight from the Phone (not from PC). I think it is worth being mentioned.
Wow thank you
It's a russian government service. I wouldn't recommend using it.
@@BlobBlobkins I thought the point here was to provide an objective list of services which offer some functionality for the end consumer, not be politically biased, especially on grounds which only proves that Google is just as bad.
@@5koKirilov Yeah. But my reason to quit google is for privacy reasons. If you use government software, I don't think it will help in my case. But you are right.
@@BlobBlobkins He also pointed out Amazon and that's just as bad as Google so I don't think the political point here stands. Plus, if you only use the Yandex Disc than they will have as much info about you as OneDrive would. Plus, Yandex is an independent business and Putin has no interest in baking it go bankrupt as Russia would lose because of it and then have to rely on Google.
a qnap with qphoto/qumagie isn't opensource but it's self hosted and you can have sync and ai scan for photo tag
I'm using Dropbox + Cryptomator, I don't have time to manage server for Nextcloud, so, I choose Dropbox.
Dropbox is nice and it has been a great tool in my toolset but its free tier is severely limited for storage of photos and videos. My daughters alone would easily consume those 2 GB in about a month or two with their selfies and whatnot!
I have my own NAS with nextcloud and syncthing.
Nice !
Which Nas are you using? I'm thinking on switch to Next cloud
I don't know this is not at all helpful to me. Because it is neither the money nor the storage space. I will switch to any Google photos alternative if it can do one thing besides syncing that is scraping text from photos. If there such service that does flawlessly then I will try it out. Onedrive is the best one at this from my experience. They are not that good with Contextual search but definitely miles ahead of Google for text OCR. But organisation of photos is bad and onedrive only works for one way sync on phones. 🤦🏻♂️If I delete a pic on my phone I want it to be deleted from the cloud as well after 60 days from the bin. Onedrive just keeps cluttering the photos. Sometimes there are number of screenshots for research purposes for short time only after I use them I want to dispose them off but can't do it because onedrive doesn't sync the deletions from gallery. 😒
Self hosting is the way... unless you live in the middle of nowhere you probably have unlimited internet data (home), tools like Nextcloud to setup your private e-mail and photo hosting are EASY to install, use and maintain and you don't need anything more than a old laptop or Raspberry Pi which is tiny, silent, cheap and you will not even notice running it on your electricity bill.
You already know more then me and I'm a sysadmin hahahahaha . Keep safe and keep doing great content ✌️
thank you for the info
one question, is prime photos "more reliable" than google photos? in therms of privacy or security.
checking the other alternatives
There is one storage I currently use : Dubox. But I don't know if it is secure or not and it gives 1TB for free.
Yes i am also
thats a chinese service owned by baidu...so i won't suggest you to use it...but at the end its upto you
@@13shubh i know that but there servers are located in japan and hong kong out side from china so i think thats. Pretty good. If u relay on google, facebook, apple ammazon so there is not a such bad thing to believe in this company. And i dont need any suggestions from indians.
I just want to know how's the mega.nz
They are giving 50gb free storage which is enough for my photos and files.
They claimed to have privacy and security.
No syncthing? It's not cloud, sure, but for backup it's dead simple and reliable. Just make sure both devices are on, and it'll sync and it'll backup to all your devices. I use it primarily for my work documents on my personal laptop, desktop, and work laptop (that I'm essentially using as OneDrive server because it's not good enough for anything else).
Where is the "instant upload" folder in nextcloud? I don't see it anywhere...
The best alternative are a offline backup
I hate having to pay someone to store my photos. For crying out loud!
Hey !
Your linode link doesn't work (the characters %E2%80%8B are automatically added in the URL for some reason)
And btw I found linode is really expensive (for shared compute, else I don't know the real price)
Weird, it works for me? Just in case, I modified the description and re-typed the link, seems to work on my end!
What about Shutterfly? You can store pictures for free, you only have to pay for videos. Could this be a good option?
Great content! You explain concepts very well. Clear and helpful.
Thanks :)
I stopped using google photos because It doesn't have random slideshow feature. I'm using app called simple gallery. It was cheap and It's offline. It has random slideshow feature. that's exactly what I wanted!
I am perfectly fine with my MEGA account . I have 50 GB for free, sync all my phone pics to the cloud and even have a Linux desktop app.
You only get those 50GB for free for a month nowadays, after that it gets reduced to 15GB.
@@uzefulvideos3440 I wasn't aware of it. I have it since...well , i can't remember actually, but more than five years for sure and it's still 50 GB. Well, i think 15 GB free is still more than what others offers for their free account. Not huge, but definitely enough for pictures storage.
@@DanieleElaborati Yes, when I got my account I also still got the full 50GB.
I think they had to change their model because of all the people creating many free accounts to host pirated movies.
@11:21 According to Techhut, the Nextcloud Snap package has significantly poorer performance than a raw install straight to the server. Just throwing that out there
What browser is that? Looks great in Elementary!
Firefox :) with a custom CSS theme from Zonnev’s GitHub page
Why don't you use a Nextcloud minimal requirements Linode + Wasabi? You can get 1TB of storage for 5.99$ a month instead of paying that much for the 80GB Linode. 😁
I'm wanting to do the same thing you did. How do you connect Wasabi to Photoprism? I'm still working on figuring out on my own, but in the meantime I'm going to keep working on it.
do you need to create an account with a provider first? i was going to use Linode, but it's not listed on Nextcloud's site as an available provider :(
Hi, thanks a million for your advice. a couple of questions, if I may:
1. for storing my photos, I currently use my own nas (no external access, only within the local network). what do you use for light photo manipulation? GIMP is too hard, something light and easy-to-use (brightness, some filters, crop, etc...)?
2. To manage calendar and contact, I'm wondering to use nextcloud on external provider but I have some privacy concern. can the external provider access to my data? or nextcloud is bullet-proof even if hosted on an external provider?
thanks. S.
Hi Salvatore,
You might want to look at Darktable for image manipulation. Also Gimp really is not that hard, just a bit of a learning curve.
2. Depends on the provider I'd say. And NOTHING is ever bullet proof. For secure contacts and calendar syncing Proton has these features added by now I believe. And else there is always Etesync
@@dutchbachelor thanks. Yep I started using Proton also for calendar but not for contacts (I need something to sync my address book also on my phone,). It's a never ending story I guess, will see...
Does anyone know how much system resources Nextcloud needs? I have an old laptop that could maybe become a nice home server. I don't think I need to sync stuff away from my home wifi.
It’s not that heavy
Runs perfectly on raspberry pi, so almost nothing.
@@bluesquadron593 Pi 4? Because that's a beast ;)
What's the point of moving from Google to Onedrive or Amazon if you're privacy conscious. If you're not then just stay with Google.
That’s why I explained that was the option for those who don’t care about privacy.
I'm very happy with MEGA for that.
Is MEGA private? I saw some post on Reddit stating MEGA is quite suspicious.
@@Funkfreed It's end-to-end encrypted, I think the only other service that offers that is pCloud.
@@uzefulvideos3440 aren't all google services end-to-end encrypted? except that google can use your photo once it arrives on their end in MEGA's case once photo or file arrives at their storage can they see it for "development" purposes?
@@Funkfreed If a picture is uploaded to Google Photos the data stream is encrypted, but Google has a copy of the key on their servers, which means Google has access to your unencrypted photos once they are on their servers.
End-to-end encryption means that the data not only always stays encrypted, but that you own the key and the service provider doesn't. You can still share end-to-end encrypted files, the link will just be longer because it also has to include the key.
Thank You Very Much for doing All this research for us Linux users.
You’re welcome :)
I love the AI built into Google Photos.
I just bought the 1TB for OneDrive 😕
F
I just sort my photos in a regular file manager so a Linode Nextcloud instance would probably be pretty good. (for me)
I got a personal NAS (4TB for now) at home where I sync all photos and videos.
can you make a video to explain how distros based on other distros work. what's the differences, what's same, why choose a derived distro over the original and such.
Install Nextcloud on a Raspberry Pi using Docker and call it a day.
Install the ownyourbits/nextcloudpi docker whether you're on an ARM device or not
There is other self hosted solutions to manage photos that include at least face recognition. But they weren't mentioned. Why?
I use 2 TB pCloud for $350, yes it's pricey but it's a one time payment
And what about Stingle Photos? it looks really close to google photos?
Are there any downsides with using the snap package? I hear many people dislike snaps (or Ubuntu or Canonical, cannot tell)
Not really, no.
Managing snap data is something to get used to. Also the snap app start is a bit slower.
Overall not a big issue as the end result is the same.
@the linux experiment what about librephotos and photoprism? both of them got an searching alghorithm like google photos. got them as dockers and they do their job pretty well. unfortunately for photoprism is the single user. you need more than one docker container if you want to manage multiple users. but thats a plus for librephotos
Hello Sir, how can i make an app like this and host that on my raspberry pi
Stingle Photos feels like to closest to Google Photos in my opinion.
Thank you
I've thought you've found a free google photos alternative. Sad that nobody has balls to do that, even google :P
Yandex disk has free unlimited photos storage.
Google photos is only free since they make money from your data.
why not use something like freenas+nextcloud
hey nick, will you say that nextcloud's tab digital is good?
What is that?
I have been using Moments that is available on Synology NAS and it is almost an exact copy of Google Photos
Moments from Synology is slow when you have large number of photos
Personally I'm going to be using mega.nz for everything in the near future. Super secure, all encrypted files via a no-trust policy akin to password managers. Storage is pretty cheap. They also have a nice cli for integrating things e.g. backups from my server running stuff like rss
Is that your cat? Almost had a heart attack when I saw those pics 😂 Mine looked just like it
OneDrive has deep learning for photos.
Getting Amazon photos client working on linux... have you tried running the Windows version using Wine?
What happens to my photos if I drop Amazon ?
I can understand the concerns of privacy, but is Google really authorised to use the photos for anything out of labelling the photos for us? Is there any source for this claim?
(I'm not asking if they might or if they do, but if there's any piece of agreement that clearly says we are allowing them to do that, I never heard anything about that)
is synology safe?
What about Mega.nz is not like photos but more like drive. But you can use it. and you can use it on Linux.
Amazon Photo not available in India region
The license you give Google to use your photos is very explicit and nothing like what you said - it's really a shame you started spreading FUD.
True that Google are allowed to analyze your photos, both for information presented to you and for improving ML algorithms, but they definitely can't do with them what they want - they can't publish them anywhere (except as per your instructions, such as when sharing) or share them out any metadata with any 3rd party.
I just re-reviewed the license terms fit Google (policies.google.com/terms?hl=en-US#toc-content) and Apple (www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/icloud/en/terms.html). The main difference is that Google's T&C have you allow Google to use your client for "developing new technologies and services for Google consistent with these terms" (emphasis theres), while Apple's have no such language.
You also mentioned some kind of track record that Google have for not keeping guess privacy, which I find weird - I've been following the tech world (and working in it) for most of my adult life and the only actual case that I can relate your comments to is the Google assistant recordings bang analyzed by a Google 3rd party service provider - and both Amazon and Apple have been caught doing the same thing.
Came looking for this. When I heard it I instantly doubted it. I’m sure no one would sign up under those terms.
The terms explained here are consistent with what I said. Google can use your photos to develop new features and products.
I personally think that’s a problem. If you don’t, that’s ok :)
@@letsgocamping88 I'm ok with this. I think it's weird that people care so much that some machines are crunching the pictures of their cats, a bit "too much". This is basically what this is about.
Linode "just" started their own... How long until they lose just from the script?
Soon :) I’ll probably redo the sponsored segments soon.
i can just not connect my server to the internet and upload my photos by using my home router as well...
Is dubox reliable with 1 tb free storage.
thats chinese service owned by baidu...so i won't suggest you to use it...but at the end its upto you
U said that linode was the best but have u heard of hetzner
What about Yandex cloud it has free unlimited Photo uploads, you need to pay only to upload videos?
¿What about ProtonMail Drive (currently beta)? ¿Do anyone have experience with this storage service?
I prefer to use Yandex.Disk - you can download app for Android, iOS, Linux, Mac and Windows. So it's convenient for a lot of people
I loved nextcloud till I borked an upgrade. Switched to seafile. Not as feature full. But does to job I need.