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Where are former customer going? Where are people looking to host photos going nowadays? Just want to survey HN.

Personally, although I am relatively hardcore on privacy, I go with Google Photos on an anonymous account (I know that since it's Google, nothing is truly anonymous, but from the steps I've taken hopefully it's a bit more sanitized) because their AI can filter and organize my photos is ways that I simply don't have the time to do.



I got sick of site after site closing down along with my albums, or, worse, using my metadata to feed the panopticon, so I quit my job to build an alternative. It's early days still, but ML auto tagging is on the horizon. Runs on desktops, servers, and within docker. Details in my profile.


Join up with this person https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21842347

We don't need more half-attempts.


Thanks for your suggestion.

PhotoStructure already has the best metadata inference and asset de-duplicating system that I'm aware of.

It scales to millions of asset files, works cross-platform, handles JPG, RAW, and transcodes videos to web-browsable formats automatically.

I haven't used an open-source project yet that didn't fall over after the first several thousand imports, and none de-dupe (not just the same SHA, mind you, but the semantically equivalent image, based on both metadata and rotation-invariant image content). They also tend to be abandoned when the original author moves on due personal reasons, toxic comments, or the "v2 rewrite" effort collapses under it's own weight.


This looks promising, thanks for sharing. Enjoyed reading about how you use metadata to tag everything and make it easy to find related photos.


After more than a decade as a Flickr pro user I've canceled the account and downloaded all my photos. They're now hosted on a synology NAS which has decent photo management apps I can host myself without worrying about data loss and privacy. Then that NAS backs up to backblaze B2 for offsite redundancy.


I realised that I was spending a lot of non-productive time on the 'social' aspects of Flickr - essentially commenting on other people's pictures to get views on my own. This effort had essentially zero useful payback in the real world and is prime reason for not moving to (and paying for) SmugMug or other portfolio sites. My dislike of the panopticon / surveillance capitalism means that I haven't attempted to move to the other obvious social media platforms (Instagram, Pinterest, etc).

So, I am still taking photographs, but have no desire to share them with others and get into the inevitable competitive desire to get 'best picture'. My 600k views and several Flickr explores (several years ago) have cured me of that itch.




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