Google Photos alternative as Add-On?

Third party integrations
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I was wondering if HA could also be used as an alternative to Google Photos – or if there are plans to integrate something like that.

I’ve seen a couple of projects listed as somewhat of replacements with advanced AI features like Scene detection, object detection and face recognition – and I would love to stop pushing my pictures to Google.

Also it makes much more sense to push the pictures via wifi to a local storage from the mobile devices than to send them to a cloud over the slower internet connections.

Access to them would also be much faster and local.

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Hey @tom_l,

thanks for the recommendation, but I know Nextcloud/Owncloud already. The feature-set for pictures are extremely basic. So no automatic organization by faces, and you cannot search for scenes, places (not GPS coordinates based), etc.

I’ve thought more about something which doesn’t feel like a step back when switching away from Google Photos.

I searched a bit and found stuff like LibrePhotos, which got an impressive feature set: Face detection, Face classification/clusterization, Image captioning, Scene classification etc.

There are some similar projects and I was wondering if someone is using one of them in HA

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I’ve considered adding a Google Photos integration before, but haven’t been clear on how it would be used directly in Home Assistant. It is not clear that home assistant itself should get involved in photo backup, but running some kind of photo backup service as an add-on (as you can run any docker container really) seems reasonable. Curious if you or others have thoughts about other direct ties in to Home Assistant.

1 Like
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@allenporter I mean the direct ties would be, to reuse already existing hardware – the Raspberry Pi 4 I’m using has a lot of free CPU power, and you can easily add a USB accelerator for neuronal networks, if required.

It would also follow the philosophy of “local first” by using Wireguard/ZeroTier/Tailscale for accessing it from away.

It just doesn’t make much sense to me to add another server, or rent one somewhere, if I got a Raspberry Pi running anyway – especially when you consider just needing 200 GB of storage.

Only hesitation would be backups. I guess I would need to make them with a third party tool instead of the built-in backup solution, as it would create very large backups each day. :slight_smile:

But yeah, beeing able to access the Media via HA and maybe even add an upload functionality/gallery to the HA app would be pretty neat as well. But I think it’s well out of the reach, given the required feature set to make it a viable alternative to Google Photos. :slight_smile: