A few years ago I undertook a project to de-Google my life, as much as possible. There are a few Google services I still use--I haven't been able to divorce myself from Google Calendar just yet--but overall the endeavor has been fairly successful!

Beyond the obvious reason to move away from Google services--privacy--having custody over my own data is important to me. I've heard too many stories of people having their Google accounts suspended due to a false-positive in Google's abuse detection systems, often without recourse.

One of the major Google services I wanted to move away from is Google Photos. It's admittedly a good product, but I wanted something open-source and self-hosted with reasonable feature parity. I eventually settled on PhotoPrism.

PhotoPrism replicates some of Google Photos' most useful features, namely face and object detection. It also adds some new ones, like:

• Screenshots, memes, and other non-photographic images are automatically partitioned off into a separate folder. This is really nice for allowing me to back up everything without cluttering my photos timeline with memes.
• Nearly-identical photos (usually photos that were taken in burst mode or in quick succession) are stacked together, so they're still individually accessible but don't clutter up your library.
• You can mark some photos as private so they're hidden from your library by default. This makes handing your phone to someone to scroll through your photos much less anxiety-provoking.
• You can configure it to automatically detect NSFW photos and mark them as private.

Unfortunately though, the PhotoPrism UX isn't great. It's slow, there's no native app for mobile (only a PWA), and it relies on a clunky third-party app to sync photos from your phone.

A friend recently introduced me to Immich, and I wanted to give it a try. The UI is much faster than PhotoPrism and more touch-friendly on mobile, comparable to Google Photos. It doesn't have private photos, photo stacking, or non-photographic image detection like PhotoPrism, but it does have a promising roadmap which includes at least some of those features.

Migrating my photo library over from PhotoPrism to Immich wasn't terribly difficult. I found this script for migrating albums and favorites, which worked reasonably well. The most challenging part was that my ISP only offers paltry upload speeds.

I really love just how much high-quality open-source software there is out there going toe-to-toe with proprietary services from major tech companies. If you're interested in trying Immich yourself, but find self-hosting intimidating, I recommend checking out PikaPods. They offer managed hosting for a bunch of FOSS apps, and they make it pretty simple.