Leaving Google Photos for good

It's rarely one thing. Google Photos scans your library to power its features and train its models, and there is no way to opt your photos out of Google's eyes short of leaving. The free storage that made it irresistible in 2015 is long gone; in 2026 the storage tiers come increasingly bundled with AI subscriptions you may not want. And underneath it all sits the single-account problem: your photos, your email and your logins share one fragile key, and account lockouts are famously appeal-proof.

The good news is that leaving stopped being a downgrade. A few years ago the alternatives were folders with a search box. Today two projects in particular, Ente and Immich, have closed most of the gap.

Google's search and face recognition are still the best in the business. Typing “that beach with the red umbrella” and getting the photo feels like magic, and the alternatives are at “very good” rather than “magic.” Sharing links that just work for your least technical relative are the other one, though as we'll see below, that gap has mostly closed too.

If Google's magic is sacred to you, stay and just add a real backup. No shame in it. For everyone else, here are the two exits.

Ente is what Google Photos would look like if it were built by people who didn't want to see your photos. Everything is end-to-end encrypted by default; the keys never leave your devices, so Ente literally cannot look at your library, and neither can anyone who compels them. The clever part is that the smart features survived the encryption: face grouping and natural-language search run on your phone, not on their servers.

The trust story is unusually strong for a small company. The entire codebase, server included, is open source and independently audited, and your files are stored in three copies across three data centers in three countries. If Ente ever disappoints you, the desktop app has a one-click exporter that hands back your whole library with metadata intact. You are never locked in.

Pricing won't wow you: a free 10 GB to try, then 50 GB for $2.49, 200 GB for $4.99, and 1 TB for $9.99 a month, with a family plan that lets five people share one subscription (pooled storage, but every member's library stays private and separately encrypted).

One myth worth retiring: since Ente is open source, can't you just self-host it for free? Technically yes, practically no. The server wants an S3-compatible storage backend behind it, the setup is aimed at infrastructure people, and the mobile apps still behave like clients of the paid service. Almost everyone who chooses Ente pays for hosted, and the three-year math below shows that's not a bad deal.

Immich is an open-source, self-hosted Google Photos replacement, and it is startlingly good. Automatic phone backup, a fast timeline, face recognition, a map view, and natural-language search powered by local ML models. The v3.0 release in mid-2026 added integrity checks that audit your library against the database and sharply better background uploads on phones. It has rebuilt roughly ninety percent of Google Photos, the software is free, and your photos never leave hardware you own.

The trade is that you become the operator. What that costs in money and in skill is exactly what the next three sections are about.

Start with the box. The sweet spot in 2026 is an Intel N100 mini PC (around $188 with 16 GB RAM and a 500 GB SSD): sips 6 to 10 watts, and its hardware video acceleration handles Immich's transcoding and ML indexing comfortably. A used office PC is cheaper upfront ($100 to $150) but burns three times the electricity. A Raspberry Pi 5 technically works, but memory prices have pushed real-world kits past $250 and its CPU crawls through a big library's initial indexing. A Synology NAS ($299 to $339 diskless) is the appliance option, with a catch: the stock 2 GB of RAM chokes on modern photo software, so budget a mandatory $25 memory upgrade.

Then the line items nobody mentions in the YouTube tutorials:

• Mirrored drives. One disk is not a plan. Two NAS-grade 4 TB drives run $200 to $260.
• A domain name for secure remote access: $5 to $10 a year.
• Electricity: at $0.20/kWh, roughly $18/year for a mini PC, $26 for a NAS, $53 for that old office PC.
• An off-site backup of the server itself, because self-hosting moves the single point of failure from Google's building to yours: Backblaze B2 at $6.95/TB/month, or a Hetzner Storage Box at about $3.50/month for 1 TB.

Prefer someone else's hardware? Managed Immich hosting exists (Elestio from ~$11/month, PixelUnion in the EU with a free 16 GB tier), or a Hetzner VPS plus storage box for about $9.50/month. Note that PikaPods, often quoted at a few dollars, prices storage such that a 1 TB library is impractical there.

So there's the math: at 1 TB, self-hosting costs roughly twice what Google charges once you count everything. The extra money buys control: no scanning, no surprise price changes, no account lockout that takes your photos with it. The economics do shift in your favor as the library grows past the fixed hardware cost, and when several family members share one server instead of paying for separate cloud plans.

This is where most degoogling attempts live or die, so let's be precise. Both platforms pass the grandma test, with footnotes.

Immich is built for households. Every family member gets their own account and private library on your server; partner sharing can merge two timelines; shared albums let several people contribute. Public links open in any browser, no app or account needed, with optional passwords, expiry dates, and even “let viewers upload” for collecting party photos. The footnote: those links only work for people outside your house if your server is reachable from the internet, which drags in the networking question below.

Ente handles sharing without any networking on your part, since it's hosted. Albums shared between Ente users stay end-to-end encrypted; public links open in a browser with password and expiry options. The footnote: on the free tier each public link stops working after five unique devices have opened it. Paid plans remove the cap.

For self-hosters, there are three ways to make a home server reachable, and the choice matters:

The upshot: if effortless sharing with non-technical relatives is a hard requirement and you don't want to run a public web server, Ente's hosted model or a paid plan's uncapped links will serve you better than a home Immich box.

Yes, and this has stopped being the weak spot. Both Ente and Immich ship real iOS and Android apps with automatic camera-roll backup, and both handle the awkward formats: Live Photos, RAW files, big videos. Immich's v3 apps (mid-2026) schedule background uploads properly on both platforms and warn you when the phone's battery optimization is quietly strangling the backup. Ente's app is stable and mature; its one tax is that encrypting everything on the phone costs some battery during large uploads.

Immich even replicates the feature people miss most: a “free up space” button that deletes local copies only after verifying, hash by hash, that they're safely on your server. (Recall from the backup guide that Google's version of this button is exactly what breaks second-cloud backups, so it's worth using deliberately here too.)

Family onboarding on a self-hosted Immich is a one-time chore per person: you create their account in the admin panel, they install the app, type in your server's address, sign in, and enable backup. Expect to personally hold four phones and toggle battery permissions. After that, everyone's photos flow to your box automatically, into private per-person libraries.

Ente hosted: not at all. It's an app-store install, indistinguishable in effort from Google Photos. Everything below this line is about self-hosting.

Immich: you need to be comfortable with Docker. The stack is four containers (server, ML engine, Redis, PostgreSQL with a vector-search extension), stood up with Docker Compose in an evening if nothing goes wrong. Two rules save most disasters. First, the database must live on a local SSD, never on a network share; NFS mounts silently corrupt PostgreSQL, a failure mode common enough that the docs shout about it. Second, read the release notes before updating: Immich moved to stable semantic versioning in late 2025, but major versions still bring breaking changes, and v3.0 required a manual database-extension migration and renamed environment variables. The working routine is: dump the database, read the notes, then upgrade.

Skip self-hosting entirely if any of these describe you:

• You want zero-ops, set-and-forget technology. A home server is a ticking clock without maintenance.
• Words like Docker Compose, reverse proxy, or database dump read as intimidation rather than instructions.
• You won't set up an automated, monitored off-site backup. A house fire or ransomware hit on an unbacked-up server erases everything, permanently.

If any of those describe you, that's fine; it's exactly what the hosted options are for.

Synology Photos deserves a proper introduction, because it's the option for people who liked the sound of “own your photos” but flinched at the word Docker. A Synology NAS is a small box with hard drives in it that plugs into your router; you buy it, click through a guided setup, and it behaves like an appliance rather than a project. Its built-in photo app does the familiar things, faces and timeline included, with all the AI running on the box in your home.

It also solves the hardest self-hosting problem for you: reaching your photos from outside the house. Normally that means renting a domain name and configuring your router, because your home internet connection's address changes whenever your provider feels like it. Synology handles this for you with its free QuickConnect service: the box keeps telling Synology where it lives, and you (and your shared links) just use a stable web address. No domain, no router surgery. Two caveats from earlier in this guide are worth repeating, in plain terms. First, the cheaper units ship with 2 GB of memory, which is fine for storing files but not for a photo app that's recognizing faces and building search indexes; without the $25 memory upgrade it will crawl or crash, so treat that stick as part of the purchase price. Second, right after you import years of photos, the box will spend days quietly generating thumbnails and scanning faces, and may feel sluggish until it finishes. That's normal. Let it work.

PhotoPrism is the calmer choice on the self-hosted side. It moves slower than Immich, in a good way: fewer flashy releases, fewer breaking changes. Your photos stay as ordinary files in ordinary folders on the disk, so even if you abandon the software someday, your library is just sitting there, browsable and copyable. And it accepts uploads over WebDAV, an old and widely supported standard for reading and writing files over the web, which means phone apps like PhotoSync can back up straight into it without special integrations. Less magic than Immich, harder to break.

1. 1Pick your path. No server in your life: Ente. Happy to run one: Immich. Already own a NAS: try its built-in photos app first.
2. 2Export everything with Takeout. Since Google closed its Photos API to third-party apps in 2025, Takeout is the only door. Deliver to Drive rather than email (links expire in about a week), and know that Google allows only five download attempts per archive part before you must re-export, so use a stable connection.
3. 3Import with the right tool (details below), and spot-check afterwards that old photos sort where they belong. This is the step where dates and locations survive or don't.
4. 4Run both for a month. Point your phone's auto-backup at the new app and leave Google untouched. Live in the new home before you burn the old one down.
5. 5Verify, then downgrade. Compare photo counts, run Immich's integrity check if that's your platform, then turn off Google Photos backup and downgrade the plan when you're ready. Never a big-bang delete on day one.

The 1 TB reality: tools, time, and where it goes wrong

The core problem is always the same: Takeout hands you dozens of zip parts in which every photo has been separated from its own dates, GPS and descriptions, which sit in little .json sidecar files (photos stored in “Storage Saver” quality are hit hardest, with EXIF stripped entirely). Live Photos arrive split into an image and an orphaned video clip. The importer's job is to stitch all of this back together, and the platforms are not equally good at it:

How long it takes: to a server on your own network, 1 TB imports in 12 to 24 hours, bottlenecked by the server's disk and CPU rather than the network. To a hosted service like Ente, you're pushing through your home upload speed: at a typical 25 to 50 Mbps, budget 5 to 10 days of continuous uploading. Both Ente's importer and immich-go resume after interruptions, so patience is the only real requirement.

Where it goes wrong, per the migration war stories: proxies that reject files over 2 GB with “payload too large” errors until you raise the limit; imports run against network-mounted storage stalling or corrupting mid-flight; a Synology's little CPU pinned at 100% for days indexing a dumped library; and Takeout's five-download limit burning out on a flaky connection. None of these are fatal, but they are why step 4 says to run both homes for a month.

One extra habit worth keeping: even after the move, hold a cold archive copy of your library in plain storage (B2, or any S3-compatible bucket). If your new home is that kind of storage, or you want the archive populated with all dates repaired automatically, that's the job PhotoBridge does.

If you don't want a server in your life, Ente is the answer, and the math backs it up: over three years its hosted 1 TB costs almost exactly what Google charges, for a fundamentally more private product with no lock-in. If you like running things, Immich on a $188 mini PC is the most complete Google Photos replacement ever built; just walk in knowing you're paying roughly double Google's price for the privilege of ownership, plus a few evenings a year of maintenance. And if a NAS already hums in your closet, you may be one RAM upgrade away from done.

Whichever door you take, the moves are the same: migrate with your metadata intact, run both homes for a month, and keep one boring cold copy somewhere no single company can touch. That's the whole trick.