I switched to https://ente.io/ a couple of months ago. I used Google Takeout to grab my bits and imported it into ente.

Some massaging was needed of the takeout data to remove some dupes but uploading was smooth and the UI is pretty good.

with E2EE, I guess there is no search? I find this to be the single biggest limitation of proton mail for example.

I find the ability to search for faces and objects a key element. Otherwise my photos just collect dust (figuratively).

Search is fine for my uses. It doesn't have the facial recognition to quickly search for all photos of a person but it looks to be tagging things in an accepta le manner and I've found the things I've been looking for.

I used their free trial - 1Gb of storage available for a year iirc - to try out a few things but then ran in parallel for a while and now have stopped syncing my new photos to Google. Good luck with whatever you decide!

thanks. Any other offerings you considered on your journey to ente.io?

I looked through the standard 'alternative to Google photos' top 10 lists that get updated occasionally and none of them offered a similar enough experience to make me look deeper.

I saw ente on a Reddit post somewhere. I like it's a mostly paid product with what seems to be a sustainable free/trial tier which is unlikely to drive them out of business. I like the e2ee, and their clients being opensource and they provide an easy way to keep an offline mirror (through the desktop client). It ticks my boxes.

Ente have 'ML Search (beta)' option, I have just spotted on their desktop app:

'This will enable on-device machine learning and face search which will start analyzing your uploaded photos locally.

For the first run after login or enabling this feature, it will download all images on local device to analyze them. So please only enable this if you are ok with bandwidth and local processing of all images in your photo library.

If this is the first time you're enabling this, we'll also ask your permission to process face data.'