Technology

I use Immich, which I host locally.

If you're technical at all, self host immich. or you and a few friends could get together and set up a pikapods for immich, it's relatively cheap and I've heard great things about pikapods. I know storing photos shouldn't require technical knowledge, but honestly unless someone you know and trust manages the service, it's hard to know who can abuse your data. I migrated from google photos to immich myself and the app ecosystem (migration tools, mobile apps, web app) are great and provide much of what google photos provided.

Immich if you self host as others have mentioned but since this is the article shared and you don't want to host it https://ente.io/ is what is talked about in the article

Something “more private, wholesome, and trustworthy,” he says. The paid service he designed, Ente, is profitable and says it has more than 100,000 users, many of whom are already part of the privacy-obsessed crowd. But Mohandas struggled to articulate to wider audiences why they should reconsider relying on Google Photos, despite all the conveniences it offers.

I have 0 experience with ente btw

I've got Immich running on a Raspberry Pi based NAS at home, which works pretty well but it's not for beginners.

Seconding immich - I host it for my family which makes sharing vacation photos easy since they all have accounts on my instance that can be shared to / from.

Idk about viewing but for automatically synchronizing pics (or any files really) from android to other devices syncthing is great. Its p2p so doesnt require setting up a server but its not like a "cloud storage" where you download on demand, instead it will actually write changes to disk on the other end which is actually great in case you lose your phone.

https://f-droid.org/packages/com.github.catfriend1.syncthingandroid/

For those who don't need cloud access, I just put all of my photos on a NAS and use a digital asset manager software. digiKam is great if you want an open source solution. I use ACDSee because it's faster and has better usability in my humble opinion. But since both of the software packages store the metadata in image files and XMP sidecars and basically only use local app-specific database for caching, if digiKam ever gets a couple of quantum leaps ahead, switching back to it isn't that big of a deal. (As usual, don't use Adobe Lightroom or you're screwed in that regard. Or so I've been told.)

Just as someone already mentioned in this thread, I can vouch for Immich as well. I self host it (currently via Umbrel on a Pi 5 purely for simplicity) and the duplicate detection feature is very handy.

Oh, and the AI face detection feature is great for finding all the photos you have of a given person, but it sometimes screws up and thinks the same person is two different people, but it allows you to merge them anyways, so it's fine.

The interface is great, there's no paywalled features (although they do have a "license," which is purely a donation) and it generally feels pretty slick.

I would warn to anyone considering trying it that it is still in heavy development, and that means it could break and lose all your photos. Keep backups, 3-2-1 rule, all that jazz.