We’re reaching the end of an era wherein billions of dollars of investor money was shovelled into tech startups to build large user-bases, and now those companies (now monoliths) are beginning to constrict their user-bases and squeeze for every single penny they can possibly extract. Fair or not.
Now more than ever, it’s important for us to step back and reconsider whether we want to be billboards for these companies anymore.
For anyone unfamiliar, some good resources to have when starting your degoogling journey are below:
Privacy Guides - A list of privacy-respecting services you can use.
Plexus - A crowdsourced information bank of service compatibility with degoogled devices.
This random PDF - A study from 2018 detailing data that Google tracks about its’ users.
Just switched from Google photos to photoprism. It’s pretty awesome! It only took 8 hours to index and label my 17500~ photos (not including the week and a half Google Takeout took). That was the big one for me. Not I am slowly working through all my other google/centralized services and seeing if there are self hosted or decentralized alternatives.
I’ve been wanting to switch to PhotoPrism for a while. Is face/object detection any good, compared to Google Photos? Do you need powerful specs, or can a low-spec machine handle it?
Face and object detection is pretty good. It gives you a list of people it doesn’t recognize so you can tell it who it is and it learns a face better the more samples it has. Low spec is fine as long as you have 4 free gigs of ram! I have mine running on a 2014 mac mini!
That’s nice to know, I’ll definitely deploy it soon then! I’m currently using NextCloud Photos, but face detection is so bad it can’t even tell male and female faces apart properly.
Thank you!
Pixelfed is a federated decentralized image and video host you might look into.
Ooh, I’ll have to look into photoprism. Thank you!
Take a look at immich, it is the best
Crying because I’m sitting on 30k+ photos and videos on Google Photos and staring down the monumental task of backing them up piecemeal.
Are you not able to use Google Takeout?
I can…but it becomes clear a couple of days into it that I won’t be able to download it all in the 1-week time frame.