Best Free & Open Source Alternatives to Google Photos

PhotoPrism is an AI-powered, self-hosted photo application that helps you browse, organize, and share your personal photo collection without giving up control of your data. With nearly 40,000 GitHub stars, it is one of the most established and trusted self-hosted Google Photos alternatives available.

Photoprism uses TensorFlow for automated classification of photos into categories, detection of scenes and objects, and face recognition. It indexes your photos in a beautiful browsable timeline with map view, albums, favorites, and moment memories. It supports RAW processing, video playback, and WebDAV access for easy file syncing. The Web UI is responsive and works well on mobile browsers.

Photoprism is available for Docker-based self-hosting and supports multi-user setups. It is licensed under its own source-available terms for the community edition and provides a polished, low-maintenance experience for individuals and families who want to reclaim their photo library from cloud services like Google Photos.

Lychee is a beautiful, self-hosted photo management application that puts emphasis on a clean, modern user interface. It makes managing and sharing photos feel effortless, with a drag-and-drop album interface, full-screen viewer, and support for EXIF data display, GPS map integration, and smart albums.

Lychee supports multiple user accounts with role-based access control, password-protected albums, and public sharing links. It handles a wide range of image formats and provides automatic thumbnail generation. The application has a mobile-friendly responsive design, making it convenient to browse and manage photos from any device.

Licensed under MIT, Lychee is self-hostable on any PHP-capable web server and can be deployed via Docker. With over 4,000 GitHub stars and active development, it is a popular choice for photographers and individuals who want a beautiful, self-hosted alternative to Google Photos with a focus on simplicity and aesthetics.

PiGallery 2 is a fast, directory-first photo gallery website built with a rich user interface and optimized for low-resource servers — especially the Raspberry Pi. It scans your existing photo folders and generates a beautiful, responsive web gallery without moving or duplicating your files.

Features include automatic thumbnail generation, full-text search, map-based geo-location browsing, and a clean Angular-based UI. It is a solid self-hosted alternative to cloud photo services, keeping your photos on your own hardware while offering a modern browsing experience.

Immich is a high-performance self-hosted photo and video management solution designed as a direct alternative to cloud-based services like Google Photos and iCloud Photos. It provides a complete media management experience while keeping all your data under your own control.

The platform features automatic mobile backup for photos and videos, including background backup and LivePhoto/MotionPhoto support. It uses machine learning to provide facial recognition and clustering, object detection, and CLIP-based semantic search, allowing you to find photos by content without manual tagging.

Immich supports multiple users with shared albums and partner sharing, so families can maintain separate libraries while sharing select content. The global map view uses photo metadata to show where memories were captured. Other features include Memories (automatically surfacing photos from past years), archive and favorites, offline mobile support, user-defined storage structures, and public sharing links.

The responsive web interface and native mobile apps (iOS and Android) provide a seamless experience across devices. Administrative functions, OAuth support, API keys, and a well-documented API make it suitable for both personal and small-team deployments.

Home Gallery is a self-hosted, open-source web gallery designed to help you browse, organize, and rediscover your personal photo and video collections. It features a mobile-friendly interface, smart tagging, EXIF metadata support, and AI-powered capabilities including face detection, face recognition, reverse image search, and geo reverse lookups.

The application runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows, and provides a lightweight alternative to cloud-based photo services. With its emphasis on privacy and local storage, Home Gallery keeps your memories under your own control while still offering modern discovery features.

Ente is a fully open-source, end-to-end encrypted platform for storing and accessing photos, videos, and 2FA secrets — without needing to trust the service provider.

📦 Repository Overview

• Monorepo containing:
  • Client apps: iOS, Android (including F-Droid), Web, Linux, macOS, Windows
  • Command-line interface (CLI)
  • Server-side code
• Licensed under AGPL-3.0
• ⭐ ~21.4k stars • 🍴 ~1.2k forks

🔐 Security & Audits

• Source code and cryptography audited by:
  • Cure53 (Germany)
  • Symbolic Software (France)
  • Fallible (India)
• As of March 2024, the entire stack (including the server) is open-source.

📱 Key Products

Ente Photos

A privacy-first alternative to Google Photos / Apple Photos.

Piwigo is a mature open-source photo gallery management application with over 20 years of development history and a large active community. It offers a complete solution for organizing, sharing, and managing large photo collections with support for albums, tags, geo-tagging, and user permissions.

Piwigo features a powerful plugin architecture with hundreds of extensions available, including mobile apps for iOS and Android, batch upload tools, slideshow players, and social sharing features. It supports multi-user setups with granular permission controls, making it suitable for photography clubs, families, and organizations that need to share photos with different groups.

Licensed under GPL-2.0, Piwigo can be installed on standard LAMP/LEMP web servers or via Docker. It is available as a free self-hosted solution and also as a managed cloud service at piwigo.com. Piwigo is a great Google Photos alternative for users who want a web gallery with a traditional album-based organization structure.

Foldergram is a self-hosted web app that turns your local media folders into an Instagram-inspired browsing experience. Each non-hidden folder under your configured gallery root becomes an "App Folder" (profile), and each image or video inside it becomes a post — mirroring your filesystem with no reorganisation needed.

Features include a home feed with Recent, Rediscover, and Random modes, a top rail with Moments or Highlights based on capture-date coverage, a grid-based library with search and sorting, a Reels tab for video folders, shared likes in SQLite, and optional role-based access (admin, viewer, public). It generates thumbnails and video previews for fast browsing and ships as a Progressive Web App (PWA). Video support relies on ffmpeg, which is bundled in the Docker image.

Compared to Google Photos, Foldergram is fully local-first with no cloud upload or AI scanning — your photos stay on your machine. Compared to Instagram, it provides the same familiar feed UI for private personal use, with no social features, ads, or algorithmic curation.