🥇10 open source alternatives to Google Photos

Do you feel like you’re drowning in digital photos? It seems like your phone fills up with your selfies and shots on its own, while selecting the best images and organizing your photos never happens without your intervention. Organizing the memories you’ve created takes time, but dealing with structured photo albums is so much more pleasant. Your phone's operating system likely has a service for storing and sorting photos, but there is a significant privacy issue with consciously sharing copies of your life, friends, children, and leisure photos with corporations (often for free). Fortunately, there is a wide range of open-source alternatives where you decide who can view your photos, as well as open-source tools to help you find and enhance the best of your favorite pictures.

Nextcloud

Nextcloud is more than just a photo hosting application; it stands out for its photo management thanks to mobile apps you can use to sync non-automated selections. Instead of sending your photos to Google Photos or Apple’s cloud storage, you can upload them to your personal Nextcloud setup.

Nextcloud is surprisingly easy to set up, and with strict controls, you can choose who has access to your albums online. You can also purchase Nextcloud hosting; it may seem similar to Google or Apple, but the difference is substantial: Nextcloud storage is visibly encrypted, and the source code attests to that.

Piwigo

Piwigo is an open-source gallery software written in PHP, backed by a large community of users and developers, featuring a variety of customizable functions and an embeddable interface. Piwigo has been on the market for over 17 years, unlike relatively newer cloud storage solutions used by default on phones. There is also a mobile app, so you can sync everything.

View Images

Storing photos is only half the task. The other is giving them meaning, and for that, you need a good set of open source tools. The best tool largely depends on what you really need. Almost everyone is an amateur photographer, even if they don’t see themselves that way, and some even make a living from it. Here, everyone will find something to their taste, and at the very least, you will need a pleasant and efficient way to browse your photo gallery.

Both Nextcloud and Piwigo have excellent built-in viewing tools; however, some users prefer a dedicated application over a web browser. A well-thought-out image viewer is great for quickly viewing several photos without wasting time loading them or even without an internet connection.

Eye of GNOME is the built-in image viewer that comes with many Linux distributions and does an excellent job of displaying images in the most common formats.
ImageGlass is another basic open-source image viewer that excels in speed and simplicity, making it an excellent choice for Windows users.
PhotoQt is an image viewer for Windows or Linux written in Qt, designed to be fast and flexible with the ability to cache thumbnails, shortcuts for keyboard and mouse, and support for many formats.

Organizing photo catalogs

The main feature of Google Photos and similar services is the ability to organize photos by metadata. A flat structure doesn’t cut down several hundred photos in your collection; after a few thousand, it’s simply impossible. Of course, using metadata to organize a library doesn’t always promise perfect results, so having a good organizer is invaluable. Below are several open source tools for automating catalog organization; you can also take part directly and set filters to sort your photos as you wish.

Shotwell – is an image cataloging program that is pre-installed by default on many GNOME distributions. It contains basic editing functions such as cropping, reducing red-eye effects, and adjusting color levels, as well as automatic structuring by date and tags.
Gwenview – an image viewing program for KDE. With it, you can browse photo directories, sort them, delete unwanted ones, and perform basic operations like resizing, cropping, rotating, and reducing red-eye effects.
DigiKam – an image organization program that is part of the KDE family. It supports hundreds of different formats, has several methods for organizing collections, and supports user plugins to extend its functionality. Among the alternatives listed here, this one is likely the easiest to use on Windows in addition to its native Linux.
Lightzone – a free open-source software for photo editing and management. This is a Java application, so it is available on any platform that supports Java (Linux, MacOS, Windows, BSD, and others).
Darktable – a photo studio, digital darkroom, and photo manager all in one. You can directly connect your camera or sync images, sort them by favorites, enhance photos with dynamic filters, and export results. It is geared towards professionals and may not appeal to casual users, but if you enjoy discussing apertures and shutter speeds, or debating Tri-X grain, Darktable will suit you perfectly.

Tell us about yourself? Have you used Google Photos and are you looking for a new way to manage your photos? Or have you already switched to something newer, hopefully open source? Of course, we've listed only a few options, so please share your favorites in the comments below.

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