I Ditched Google Photos
I've been tinkering with a setup at home for replacing Google Photos. I few months ago I felt comfortable ditching it now with my TrueNAS and Immich setup.
My first machine was a FreeNAS (before TrueNAS lol) box I had bought several years ago which came pre-built and installed with FreeNAS. Suffice to say, it was easy to get started and I configured it to my liking at the time. But it was slow.
I built a more performant NAS (with better specs) after that using an old computer I had lying around. It is what allowed me to stop using Google Photos and go full self-hosted! I've since started a shop where I take refurbished computers, upgrade and optimize them for storing pictures and videos and sell them.
If you're interested, please check it out at https://adevbox.com/
I'd also be curious to hear about your photo/video serving and backup solutions. I'm using Tailscale to access my Immich instance when I'm not home. Accessing my media from outside my home was a blocker for getting rid of Gphotos.
I can't really ditch Google photos without these
It also has map+time features. I’d give it a try if you haven’t already. It’s under active development atm
You don't give the reasons why. Having off-site backup is always wise. I keep my original photos at home.
You’re right about the offsite backup. I follow the 3-2-1 backup strategy and upload to AWS Glacier cold storage as my offsite. It’s cheap and I can switch/turn it off if costs change. My NAS remains as the hot storage.
Currently the only option is to request a Google Takeout every couple of months and manually copy the ZIP to the NAS which is a pain.
I want to download takeout files (120+ files) directly to my Synology 220+ but Google takeout is very cumbersome and I can't get a way to queue them and automate the task. They really could make an effort to make Google Photos NAS sync easier....
I wrote up some tips here: https://photostructure.com/faq/takeout/
This is what I did:
1. First try to fetch all your Google Photos via Takeout in one archive. If it fails (like it did for me), try different-sized .tgz archives. I had to use the 10 Gb option (using 50gb caused an internal-to-google error).
If that fails to work, the last resort is to manually create by-year albums, shove all photos from that year into that album, and do a takeout of just that album. Repeat as necessary for every year. Yes, this is a huge PITA--which is why I recommend the following:
2. Install an app on your phone to *directly* upload the original photos and videos from your phone to your NAS/home server. I have several recommended apps here: https://photostructure.com/faq/how-do-i-safely-store-files/#...
At this point, you can still use Google Photos (for viewing and as a last-ditch backup), but your originals are safe (without all the Google Photo downsampling and metadata shenanigans), and you're free to use whatever self-hosted software you want (like PhotoStructure, but there are a ton of alternatives, as well).
FWIW, I also tried this software: https://github.com/mholt/timeliner -- it does what it can, but the files you get via the API has a bunch of metadata stripped from it. I even had captured-at times get mangled with older photos.
In Timelinize, I'm focusing on importing Takeout archives first (though I'll reinstate API downloads later) because of this exact problem. Timelinize has a vastly improved schema and can handle data from any data source, not just Google Photos. For example it also imports iPhone backups.
I think PhotoStructure is a great project and I've taken some inspiration from it