My friend and I built https://pixaver.com. It doesn’t address all of the points you note here, but it does offer some piece of mind if we get locked out of Google Photos.
Congrats on building such a nice tool! I‘d gladly pay for something self-hosted, or some tool that allows me to download it on my own hardware.
I don‘t want to solve the problem by
A) paying even more money every month, much less even more than for Google Drive & Photos storage itself!
B) uploading my personal photos to a completely untrusted provider (at least I can trust Google to some degree to not leak my photos to any stranger on the internet).
Those are fair points and thoughts I’d probably have myself. I’m not trying to sell you on this, but here are my responses to your two notes.
The first is that we know it’s more expensive than Google Photos storage. That’s in part so that we can actually fund development. As a small operation we can’t run it as a loss-leader or make up revenue from other channels like Google could.
The second is that we’ve been somewhat vetted through Google’s application process. We’ve also been building things for the web for 20+ years. Admittedly, trust is hard to earn from folks you don’t know, but we are decent people.
To be honest, Pixaver probably isn’t right for most folks on HN as most here are pretty technical. (I’m just a daily reader here, and spotted this thread, so I thought I’d share it.)
We’ve geared this more for people like my mom who don’t want to set up a local hard drive or do anything even remotely technical. For someone like her, it’s a couple of clicks to having a second backup without needing to do anything additional. :-)
We’ve thought about it, but I think it’ll be a while before we’re able to get to that. We also run two other products, and we’re just two people. So, we’re already spread a bit thin.
Let me know if that happens! I'd love an easy way to make sure my data is safe in the event Google randomly bans me :) I'll check out Pixaver soon to see if it'd work as a backup for my Google Photos!
Nice! If you do try it, please let us know how the experience goes for you. I think the onboarding process is a bit intimidating given the (necessary, yet lengthy) permissions we request.
I’ll mention that you’d be interested in more options around backups to @shelkie. Like I said, I don’t think we can make this happen now, but it’s good to have a sense for what others might find useful.
I don‘t want to solve the problem by
A) paying even more money every month, much less even more than for Google Drive & Photos storage itself!
B) uploading my personal photos to a completely untrusted provider (at least I can trust Google to some degree to not leak my photos to any stranger on the internet).