We use Google Photos for exactly this. We have an account that is separate from our personal accounts that we share. That account is on all of our devices and all photos upload to it directly. We pay for 1TB of storage ($10/month) Easy to share albums w/ fam and friends. Also crazy good search - like ' photos of [son's name] and [wife's name] at the beach in may' will return photos of ... exactly that. With no tagging.

Actually I think for my use case Apple Photos is the better option. Comes installed on my iMac and iphones. Family sharing, and has a more tiered approach to pricing (I don't need 1TB right now) - $0.99 for 50GB/month.

Apple Photos uploads things automatically every time, face tagging, place/moments tagging automatically, it rocks. This HN thread was amazing, I found Apple Photos!

Why doesn't Google Photos work for you ? It does provide all the features you mention (depending on definition of "Nice gallery feature" of course), and on top of it really awesome search features.

Full disclosure: I work at Google (not on the Photos product though). All opinions expressed are purely mine, and not of my employer.

Google just shut down Picassa and you expect people to trust Google again and move to Google Photo ? Google should build trust first and foremost. Anybody who would still rely on a "non core Google product" at that time risks nothing short of a big disappointment.

Api,services are being shut down and this time people don't even have 2 months to move. Picassa and Google Photos are 2 different products, if people stuck with Picassa there must have been a reason.

I agree with sergiotapia about Google Photos falling short in the area of sharing pictures among family members. If we do trust Google not to kill off Google Photos...

Without grahamburger's hack of creating an independent, shared account (which I wonder whether is strictly allowed by account usage terms), how can a family share all of their photos? I'm not talking about sharing an album. My wife and I would like all photos taken from either of our phones be automatically uploaded and shared between us. We've not found a way to do that using Google Photos without making everything public, which is unacceptable.

Private links, like Google Drive has, is probably an upcoming feature.

I don't trust Google to not pull the rug under me.

Have you looked into Picturelife[0]?

They have native iOS and Android apps as well as a web app. They also offer the option to use your own AWS S3 bucket[1] at which point you can use their service for free. And you'd still retain complete control of the photos because you have access to the S3 bucket.

You can also download your whole library as a zip file with or without metadata[2].

[0]: https://picturelife.com/home

[1]: https://support.picturelife.com/hc/en-us/articles/202605823-...

[2]: https://support.picturelife.com/hc/en-us/articles/202512346-...

That looks really cool, especially that you can use your own S3 bucket. That has always been my major problem with hosted photo apps - that I couldn't trust them not to disappear with my photos. Whilst Amazon could also theoretically disappear with my photos too, I see them as a pretty secure option.

The only main thing missing here is the ability to install the web application on my own hosting account. I'd love someone to have a business model where the base app is free and open source, but there exist paid mobile and desktop apps and third party extensions. Basically, a WordPress-esque ecosystem, but for photos.

Flickr or SmugMug.

Flickr would probably require some tuning, as it's built as a social, not private photo-keeping, tool. SmugMug, though, is targeting professional photographers, so high-res, galleries, exporting is all there.

Flickr pricing is kinda off-putting - $0 for 1TB, $499 for 2TB.

Thanks for the mention! Appreciate it. :) The bulk of our business (2/3rds of subscribers) is non-Pro. We come off as fairly professional (and we love our Pros!), but I think that's mostly because we have a huge emphasis on presentation. Our philosophy is, if you care about photos enough to pay for somewhere great to keep them safe and show them off with the people you care about, you're in the club. We'd love to have you.

Oh, and I should mention we've had unlimited storage for a reasonable yearly fee for nearly 14 years.

I think Dropbox ticks all 4 requirements.

That is what I use. Their ios & android has automatically uploaded my camera photos for years.

I move some into specific folders to share with family via their photo album (gallery) link feature.

As its dropbox, it is all just files and synced to my laptops all the time as well.

The only issue is if you like their gallery feature. I do, some may not. They recently closed their Carousel alternative.

https://photos.dropbox.com/app/timeline https://carousel.dropbox.com

My 3 part blog series on how I automated my workflow using Elodie and Google Photos will probably be interesting to you.

https://medium.com/@jmathai/understanding-my-need-for-an-aut...

My Windows phone with OneDrive integration does this really nicely, minus the gallery feature (though there's probably a solution for that online or something, I just haven't looked.) I really like the fact that I can take pictures of stuff on the shop floor, walk back to my work PC, and the photos are already synced.

Take hard copies of those pictures and also consider having them transferred to film/negative. (I wonder if there will be a demand for this in the future)

I have a synology Nas at home with a 6tb storage which might suit your needs.

The photostation app backups my cellphone photos to the NAS, I also have daily glacier backups and backup to my home desktop regularly.

The only caveat is that due to security, I restricted web access to the nas storage, so that the pictures are only backed up when the cellphones are connected to my house network.

> My wife will decapitate me if I lose our backup pictures of our kids when they were babies.

The best way to preserve photos is to print them. Prints can last decades if not centuries with no need to actively maintain them other than throwing them in a shoebox.

Google Photos is perfect for this, and for most of them it is free.

iCloud Photo Library does this. The Mac Photos client can pull down the full library and the be backed up etc as a normal file.

Have you figured out a way to have a shared (family) photo library? My wife and I use different iCloud accounts, are part of iCloud Family. However, I cannot setup a single shared library for all the kid's pictures we take.

Nice. I didn't know it was on my iMac. All the pics I took on my iphone are already backed up on photos online. Pretty nifty!

Flickr?

Dropbox.