I want to get off Google photos, but I also don't want to pay a subscription. And I don't really want to self host. A pay once service I'd accept, but I haven't seen one with an extremely cursory search. I don't need any fancy features. Just store the photos, let me see them online, and let me put them in albums.
this post was submitted on 24 May 2024
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Privacy
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Hosting pictures cost money
If its free, then you are the product. Can't really expect to switch to another free product and expect any form of privacy. You could try Microsoft's One Drive but it isn't much different. I've been recommending Ente Photos which is a subscription but it's worth it for me. About 3 or 4 bucks a month for 50GB.
If its free, then you are the product
Right. I get that. But I'd like to just pay once. I don't like subscriptions. But since file storage has ongoing costs, it seems unlikely anyone would offer a pay-once-and-we'll-host-your-files.
There is pcloud and filen.io both have lifetime plans but I'm not sure how close you can get to something like Google Photos or Ente Photos with these providers.
Google services I still use before being unGoogled:
- Voice: I have to make like 1 or 2 calls within the US a year & not worth a SIM
- Maps: for when OSM isn’t cutting it & I’ll contribute the missing data after I found it
- Translate: for when Yandex Translate doesn’t cut it (everything ‘free’ only works with European languages)
- YouTube: no real alternative here that isn’t limited to just a piece of its scope, but viewed thru Librewolf+uBlock Origin+SponsorBlock or PipePipe
… and the last one is just basically every employer I have worked with puts all their company data on Google & it can’t really be avoided with them >:(
Not relly true, eg YT, there are still several scripts to gut out ads, tracks and nags from YT (take a look in Greasyfork or OpenuserJS) (for YT naturally filter the newest and recent updated scripts), if one of the front-ends dont work.
Well, OSM and forks or Here maps don't have the features of Gmaps (eg Street view) but are way enough for the most use.
For translations, OpenSource isn't sinonimo of bad, eg, CrowTranslate for Desktop or the Linguist extension for the browser are FOSS and maybe the best you can find out there, multiengines for more than 120 lenguages, they use the APIs of Google, Yandex and others (customizable, Linguist use also the Bergamot Translator(At the moment still in developement and only EU languages, but they'll add more soon)), similar to the front-ends for YT, so Google isn't a problem.
Yes, naturally if you are an Google user for your work, few you can do, but there are alternatives to use Google only the minimum needed.
A YouTube alternative client doesn’t change that all of the infrastructure is Google’s. Even this video shows you need YouTube to reach the audience you want for this style of content.
I hadn’t heard of new translators options in the last two years, but only Lingva listed the two non-English languages I actually use. The rest are all European-based languages. I may have some time to check it out, but it looked like quite a bit of tooling to set up.
Both translators mencioned, Crow and Linguist are full customizable with cusom translators, Crow include, among others, also Lingva by default nd both can traduce more than 120 lenguages, depending on which engine you activate, posting even in Sanscrit if you want
Can't help but mention Yandex is 100% as evil as Google is.
Out of popular choices, DeepL is probably least evil. Reverso is often a nice pick, too, especially Reverso Context.
There are also things like LibreTranslate, though the quality is generally lower (but can absolutely come in handy for simpler requests)
Yandex might be the same as Google, but spreading your footprint across services still has value as a technique for mitigation. The only other thing I use Yandex for is the occasional image search since it can sometimes do a better job than others.
Fair enough; however, to me it's only optimal when there are no alternatives.
But to each their own.
You also can use a LLM model
A local open-source one, preferably.
I used AI to summarize the different Google products and services listed in the video along with their suggested alternatives and timestamps. AI is pretty cool sometimes.
| Google Product/Service | Recommended Alternatives | Timestamp |
|---|---|---|
| Google Chrome | Firefox, Brave, Arc, Ungoogled Chromium | 94-326 |
| Google Search | Startpage, Ecosia, DuckDuckGo, Brave Search, Kagi | 328-493 |
| Gmail | Tutanota, ProtonMail | 534-671 |
| Google Photos | Ente, Stingle | 674-794 |
| Google DNS | Quad9, NextDNS, Cloudflare | 827-1074 |
| Google Analytics | Not covered in this video, to be discussed in part 2 | N/A |
| Google Maps | To be covered in part 2 | N/A |
| Google Ad Services | To be covered in part 2 | N/A |
| Google Drive | To be covered in part 2 | N/A |
| YouTube | To be covered in part 2 | N/A |
Brave has an openly homophobic founder, it’s weird to me that they’d mention the crypto issues and not this
Yes, I did it oftn. But main reason to avoid Brave is the somewhat fishy Crypto Policy and the betrayal of users in the past, redirecting searches to related crypto companies, which shows dubious business ethics regarding the user. For me Brave is simply not trustworth.
My main issue with it is the fact that the company has shown it is willing to cross boundaries.
Much better reasons than insinuating a piece of software is homophobic.
Homophobic the CEO Eich, but for the user it's more important the ethics of the company, questionable in Brave.
Yes. I'm agreeing.
And Microsoft has a habit of interfering with democracies and bribing governments. Let's not pretend any big tech is a saint. The difference between dumb billionaires like Eich and Musk and others is that they have bad PR.
I don’t like Microsoft either and I’m not sure the relevance of you bringing this up, is this trolling?
It's not trolling. Eich is a scumbag but if you ditch Brave, right now your only real options and Microsoft Bing and Google. And I think MS and Google do way more bad to the world than Eich. How many MS nd Google executives do you think are right wingers donating to anti gay groups? Definitely not zero.
I disagree that those are the only options, even in the video we are commenting on they name some others
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