[mceachen]

I'm not aiming to replace Google Photos specifically, but you might want to try PhotoStructure: I'm the author.

I wrote it to sweep all the photos and videos from 30+ HDDs I've accumulated from prior servers and backups and laptops into one neat deduplicated pile, free from invalid or corrupt or bitrotted copies.

There's a fast web-based front end that uses random sampling and hierarchical tagging to find stuff quickly, and to make browsing feel serendipitous.

ML-powered search is coming in a future release. Something like CLIP is looking to be the most promising currently, rather than auto-tagging and then indexing those tags.

Lots more details are here: https://photostructure.com/faq/why-photostructure/

Regardless of using PhotoStructure or not: if you self-host (anything!), please be sure to figure out a backup strategy for your data. I wrote this article to help: https://photostructure.com/faq/how-do-i-safely-store-files/

[mig4ng]

I'd say having a mobile app (both android and iOS) is a must for a product like this