The photos upload just fine but the videos? Whether it was the video container format, the resolution, or something else, I can't remember now. But Google Photos was struggling to replay a video recorded on my phone. After some searching it seems I wasn't alone. So I did what any sane man with too much time and a Comp Sci degree does — I went to find an open-source, self-hosted alternative and found Immich.

Immich isn't the only option, the great (and sometimes not so great) part about open-source software is that, if you can think of it, someone's already done it 12 times over (and if not, get to work!!). There's an incredible amount of (software you can self-host with nothing more than a Raspberry Pi or an Oracle Cloud Free Tier account (go take a look!).

Immich has a ton of features; multi-user support, shared albums, RAW images, LivePhotos, favourites, metadata viewer, image tags, and even some ML features like facial detection and searching by image content. It's even got native iOS and Android apps! Needless to say, it seems its more than competent at replacing Google Photos.

Now to take back my £1.50 a month, Google...

Initially as a test, I set up Immich on a Oracle Cloud instance graciously given for free and it works great. The issue is that while generous with RAM and compute, the Oracle gods are not so lenient with their disks. The free tier of Oracle Cloud limits you to only 200GB of block storage which, along with everything else I run on there, doesn't leave a whole lot for photos. And the price of more block storage makes Google seem like a charity.