I’ve switched my email etc. to https://infomaniak.com/
I’m planning on move all my media out of google photos but I really like the ability to search by a persons face, or to search “Dog” and then it’ll show me all my pictures with dogs in them.
I have 100k photos, so having search functionality like this is curtail.
I’m not self hosting at the moment, but looking at my options.
I have a mini PC with a terabyte of storage I might leverage.
Always better to self-host photos if you can, rather than need to migrate them again in the future when wherever cloud service inevitably shuts down or enshitifies.
I’m hosting 500k photos with Immich, and the search capability is leagues better than Google Photos.
The caveat there is that you’re personally responsible to maintain backups of your image catalog when self-hosting.
That’s not a caveat, as you should be making your own backups of your photos no matter where they’re located.
As an example, this man who lost all his photos because Google closed the account for an invalid reason, with no recourse.
For something irreplaceable like photos, you should take your own backup no matter where they are. If you’re not already doing this - have a good think about how painful it would be to lose all your photos, even if the perceived risk is low.
This doesn’t apply to just Google Photos of course. Any cloud provider has the possibility of losing your data or locking you out of your account. Even if the risk is low, do you want to roll those dice?
I’m probably going to self host, as well as back up to secure cloud storage.
That way if my house burns down, I still have a backup.
This is the way 👍