Your homepage says "protect your photos/faces etc. from algorithms"
The algorithms are what makes Google Photos; Google Photos. If I wanted to just store my photos I'd throw them in a S3 bucket or Dropbox or something.
Google Photos lets me automatically categorise my photos by person, lets me search my library using text search for anything (e.g. I can search 'museum' and see pictures I've taken in museums). That is where the real value of Google Photos comes into play.
> But we are far from where we want to be in terms of features (object and face detection, location clustering, image filters, ...) and user experience. We are hoping to use this post as an opportunity to collect feedback from fellow hackers.
So you're going to implement algorithms then?
Those "algorithms" can run locally, on a NAS or a desktop, generate the metadata and make it available to you only on your mobile.
I can see myself paying for such software if it was mature enough.
Synology Photos is one such solution already for example.
I have Synology, actually. Is Synology Photos trustable?
The software with these features is called Synology Moments. I use it and I mostly love it, at the very least as a backup for my Google Photos.
My experience is that it works great, provided that you're on your local network. When away from home or traveling, less so. Maybe I could configure things better to alleviate that, I don't know, but I haven't managed to yet.
Sharing is less convenient. Trying to share a photo on-platform is a terrible experience for the receiver with multiple slow redirects, so much so that generally if you're on mobile it's easier/better to just download the photo to your device and share the photo directly. The Moments android app has a flow for doing this, which is nice. It also makes a certain amount of sense: the alternative would be others connecting to your NAS online, which is always going to be less nice than just connecting to Google photos.
The search capabilities are pretty decent. It can recognize people and tag them appropriately. It can recognize some things. In some ways, I prefer searching it over searching Google Photos. But again, only if you're on your local network with your NAS.
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Edit: see aborsy's response to me below. Looks like I'm a version behind. Maybe on-platform photo sharing is better now, I'll update the software and check it out
For at-home NAS, is Synology the best for recreating Google services?