I tried all the usual ones recommended, Proton, Tuta etc, but following a recommendation from another Lemmy use, I've found Fastmail to give the best results. 60GB of email storage as well.

For now.

There's also managed Immich options (although Ente is probably better in this case since it is ecrypted):

https://pixelunion.eu/

https://store.elfhosted.com/product/immich/ (although I don't think I'd trust a service that appears to be 100% AI-generated).

https://elest.io/open-source/immich

I also made a tool with my brother to share photos with others in a trip:

https://github.com/Linkee12/PhotoBin

You can create a temporary album available for 30days, and everybody can share, select what they want to save and export. You can also put it on a VPS because it's E2E encrypted, the server doesn't see your photos.

Custom domain first, then chose your email provider.

I'm on protonmail now, but was on Zoho mail before.

My custom domain allows me to switch more easily, it took me literally 3 years to switch from @gmail.com, never again.

I got a year of @Thundermail.com for $72.00.

I use The Flatpak on my Desktop and grabbed it from F-Droid on my Pixel 10.

I don't even have Google Play Services installed on my daily driver/main profile. 🙃

ente is vibe-coded

Moving to Ente? Or moving to Proton family? Mixed of both?

I also found out the reported Photos usage via Google profile is way undercounted. It shows i have 30 GB of photos. I just requested a checkout of all Photos and well.... i need to download 120GB...

Original source article:

https://www.androidauthority.com/google-personal-intelligence-privacy-3727111/

Also, fuck off, Pichai. You fucking banchode.

Fucking hell. Time to take all the photos down. It's been at least a decade since a photo has been uploaded there, because I knew Google can't be trusted and I disabled the automatic upload, just hadn't taken the already uploaded images down. On top of that, for months I have been in the process of moving off gmail to Zoho Mail. Fuck Google.

Problem being that even a 4TB NAS costs almost 1000€ to buy or build... It's painful.

Odd how these headlines always ramp up as Alphabet (
Google) approaches their quarterly earnings report.

Problem is every institution by default expects you to have gmail. If not then you need to have it. This is what fucked up.

Those advertisers are constantly subsidizing the evil tech bros. Fuck all products! /s

I've been using PixelUnion for some time now to test if I actually am comfortable with deleting Google Photos and I'm pretty sure I'm about to pull the trigger. They've been fantastic.

I also tried Ente but I honestly do not like them. It would be ideal if Immich were E2E encrypted but for me the difference in quality is so big that I don't mind them not being encrypted.

If you want to take back control of your data, there are open source alternatives to almost every Google product

Nextcloud is awful with photos. Loads slow, no useful features for photos. Otherwise it's great but would go for immich any day when it comes to photos

It launched commercially in early 2021 so the base is definitely human coded

Great, so I'm going to get advertisements of an "adult" nature soon

Yup thanks

Just looked and yeah, not far off when you buy new. An old PC with a couple of hard drives can do the trick, but obviously it's more work to set up.

The used and refurb market is your friend.

For large capacity refurb enterprise-grade drives, I recommend serverpartdeals

I've had some good 16TB drives from there for a good few years and still kicking. They can be a little loud though. You can get 10TB drives for maybe €250.

A Synology 4-bay NAS can be bought second hand from eBay for about €200-€300. They aren't very powerful but might be fine for Immich and pretty easy to use. Many come with some hard drives you can pawn off or get started with using a RAID config that means if one or two die you are fine. If the drives are second hand (not pro refurb) though do not pay more than 30% of retail price because who knows how long they will last.

Photos don't take up that much space. Even 100 000 photos tends to take up less than 500GB. Video is much heavier, so if you're a videographer you may struggle without reencoding.

Taking your photos down may not remove them from their dataset. If they really wanted to they could restore them for their dataset. You wouldn't ever know.

No, every institution expects you to have an e-mail. Gmail is just one of the thousands upon thousands of providers.

At this point it's tempting to tell them Google has banned you.

Not at all surprising. Microsoft is already doing similar sorts of things it seems. Like on a work system, I was looking at one of our vendor sites, and Edge's AI assistant started recommending places I could get a cheaper deal for items that I stopped to look at for a bit too long. So not only do you get a shittier slop infested product in Edge, but it's also pretty much an AI powered adware that watches every page you visit, and you can't easily get rid of it / its monitoring.

You will be surprised.

Moochs. Everything has become a transaction for them.

It's not a transaction anymore, the values are skewed so heavily in favour of Google so that it is far better to pay for services that respect your privacy.

Users concerned about the latest privacy change can disconnect Gmail, Google Photos, and other connected apps from Personal Intelligence or disable Personalized Recommendations through their Google Account settings.

Most important part of the article.

There's a reason they scrapped that slogan again.

Their own phrasing:

Google does not scan G Suite emails for the purposes of ad targeting

Sounds a lot like weasel wording to me. Could be they're still scanning - for other pruposes.
The article obviously does not clarify.

I'd rather they tell us all the data mining they do do.

AT THIS POINT, Google is just gonna try to replace our friends with AI that only advertise and if we say no to the ai for advertising, it sends a drone to kill us (remember there will be alternatives)

And still people are going to say "I have nothing to hide". (edit: or any variation of This is Fine)

Maybe a few less now.

Targeted advertising should be illegal. Solves a lot of problems. You can pick an ad based on its location (sports.example.com can have sports ads and astrology.example.com star ads), but not based on who's viewing it. Now there's less motivation to read all your personal information.

Glad you said this because I went into my Google accounts and shut all that crap off. Instead of getting ads for mountain bikes I'm going to get ads for paint brushes and manicures but at least they don't know anything about me.

Can you name one? Email, yes. Gmail though?

Huh. Shows you how cynical I am, I already thought they were doing this.

They do know everything about you, and probably will sell it or exploit it in some other way, but not with targeted ads, you turned that off.

people who have nothing to hide should let everyone see any information they have

Wait.... This is new? They didn't do that already? Really? I though this was the whole business model which made Google so big.

It happens on some pages. Doesn't let you in with "unknown" domains claiming that it's not a real email

Remember when the entire selling point of Gmail was lots of storage and "no obtrusive ads like Yahoo Mail or Hotmail"? Pepperidge Farms remembers.

Which isnt even the point and never has been.

It is all about potential of material that someone can use against a person for likeness. Never mind having nothing to hide when anyone can invent something for you to hide.

this needs more visibility

First, he specifically said "every institution by default expects you to have gmail." Not requires a known domain. So I asked for an example.

Regarding your experience, I'd say that's still very, very rare. Certainly not "every institution" like OP claimed, and probably not even common large institutions. I'd be interested in an example of even one of those. Rejecting specific temp email domains is certainly something some sites do, but as someone that has a couple unique domains that I've used for years, large companies requiring Gmail or rejecting custom domains is not something I've experienced thus am curious about a specific example of such claims.

So surprise us??

This repo exists solely to help you compare all the alternatives.

My quick look through the feature matrix, the best options (purely in terms of the number of features in the comparison) are Ente, Immich, and Nextcloud (there's both Nextcloud Photos and Nextcloud Memories—I'm not sure how they work together vs separately). Unfortunately a "memories" feature isn't in the feature matrix, but from a quick search I believe all the options I just named have it.

Posteo is a quality service.

Are you talking about Nextcloud core, or specifically the Nextcloud Photos app?