It's basically a software package on the Synology NAS which creates a locally hosted version of Google Photos (including sharing and gallery capability). It comes with Android/iOS apps that can automatically backups all photos directly to your NAS and thus stay in your own ownership.

There is a cost of entrance though - you need to buy the NAS and harddrives... but IMO there's nothing quite like owning your own data.

Sure, but I already have servers and terabytes of storage. Also, I don't want to keep a server/NAS at home. I want it sitting on a big, fat pipe in some DC with professionals maintaining it.

https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#pho...

Best google photos clone I've come across so far.

EDIT: no E2EE or mobile support, it’s web based. It is self hosted with a privacy focus.

[0] https://photostructure.com/

If you ever find anything odd, confusing, or buggy, please tell me, I'll try to get it addressed asap.

My wife and I use it exclusively to auto-backup our mobile photos.

With that in mind, I'd say that yes it works, but is it the right tool? Not really.

First, we don't use the web stuff at all, the app isn't great when it comes to choosing what, how and to which folders things should be synced. It is however useful that I can share my auto-upload folder with my wife's account so she can print the photos I take of our baby daughter, she's almost exclusively the subject of our mobile photographs these days.

Finally, you're almost guaranteed to break it every few updates. I've spent several evening over the past couple of years recovering from updates. Much of this is likely down to my lack of knowledge of FreeBSD, but honestly, it shouldn't be breaking in the first place.

I began writing something in something in Golang, that would use microservices to read out exit data, generate thumbnails and provide APIs to give family members custom photo frames we could push photos to. Unfortunately I haven't had the motivation to continue working on it.

I'll keep looking for something else with good Android apps, preferably written in Golang so it's lean and easy to update that'll do the backup/sharing.