Photos without Google, Apple & Co.

90 min Average
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Illustration mit rechteckigen Kuchenstücken in verschiedenen Farben auf einer leicht türkisen Kuchenplatte. Die Glasur besteht aus einem weißen Rand um farbige, rechteckige Fruchtbeläge herum. Beides erinnert optisch an Polaroid-Fotos. Illustration: Florian Biege

Did you get a taste of freedom during your holiday? Then your latest holiday photos shouldn’t be trapped in a closed system! Because in such a system, others make the rules; your holiday snaps become AI training data and help the big tech bosses find out more about you, your family and your holiday.

Your photos will be just as free as you feel on holiday if you use open-source alternatives to save them.

Different ways to cook

Our digital switch recipes provide an easy, simple way to give Big Tech the push, but there are other options available. We have tried to make it easy by focusing on a single approach and a small number of options, but there are other alternatives that are just as good. After all, what we mean by ‘good’, ‘not so good’ and ‘bad’ is open to debate: DI.DAY is about easy ways to give Big Tech the push (without getting into purism or being preachy). Our decisions are based on advice from our advisory panel.

An overview of the alternatives is available on the next page:

Alternatives to Big Tech

Ingredients

1 pinch of trust in open source

for genuine control and transparency over your private memories

Your preferred storage location

a privacy-friendly hosted web cloud service or even your own server (a network storage, called “NAS”, or a “Raspberry Pi” in the basement).

1 pinch of patience

for the initial export of your data with Google Takeout or manually (see switch recipe data clouds).

Preparation

1 Choosing the right foundation

Choose the storage location for your photos that works best for you. Here are a few options.

Immich

Offers a nice timeline and automatically removes duplicate photos (‘duplicate removal’). You have complete control over it, but you do need to host Immich yourself on a server. This isn’t for everyone.

Pixelunion (Netherlands)

You like the benefits of Immich, but don’t want to manage your own server? At Pixelunion, you get Immich as a ready-made solution – and you even get 16 gigabytes for free to try it out. Also Peak Networks (Switzerland), Ossrox (Germany) or elestio (Ireland) prepare Immich for you – with different terms and conditions.

Nextcloud Memories

You’re already using Nextcloud for your digital life (see switch recipe Nextcloud), aren’t you? With the Memories app, you get a photo management tool for your Nextcloud.

Ente Photos (India)

If end-to-end encryption is particularly important to you, you could try Ente Photos from India (which has servers in the EU): your photos already get encrypted on your device before they reach the storage location. With end-to-end encryption, not even the provider can view the photos – a major advantage compared to other services. Ente offers you 10 gigabytes of storage space free of charge to try out the service.

2 Preparing & getting used to it

Free your photos: Request your photo library using tools such as Google Takeout (see recipe Data clouds) or transfer them to your local storage device. Both Pixelunion (Free photos from Google) and Ente (Free photos from Google or Apple) provide their own guides for this.

Connect the app: Install the app that fits your new photo home (see above) on your smartphone and/or desktop computer, and enable automatic background backups.

3 Season to taste

First, organize your folder structures: use features such as the ‘Storage Template’ in Immich to automatically organise your photos neatly by year and month in the background. Please note: In our experience, if you use this feature after connecting your app, photos end up in new folders with strange file names. So you might want to organize your files beforehand?

Pixelunion also offers a guide on how to mirror photos onto your own computer.

Dessert

Don’t forget security: when it comes to photos, remember the ‘3-2-1 backup rule’: 3 storage locations in at least 2 different places for your 1 unique data set. A photo server alone does not (unfortunately!) replace a separate external backup.

Enjoy your meal! You have just taken a big step towards a more independent digital existence.

Once you #DIDit – share our post about the digital switch and inspire others to take control of their own digital lives!

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