Cutting the cloud tether is increasingly easy, with plenty of excellent self-hosted options to house your documents and media library on your own NAS drive. But there’s one service that’s proven stubbornly tricky to replace — Google Photos. Out of all Google’s apps and services, Photos is the one that I use the most religiously. Whether it’s automatically backing up my phone’s photos, neatly organizing trips into albums, sharing snaps with family and friends, or quickly editing a pic when I’m not at my PC, Google Photos is a powerful one-stop-shop for everything mobile-photography related. As I’m sure you know.
Still, I’ve taken so many snaps over the years that I’ve hit Google Photos’ free 15GB limit. I’m reluctant to pay monthly for Google One storage when I have terabytes of disc space sitting idle on my home server. But breaking out from this particular Google service is harder than most.