I've tried everything. If you like a modern UI and simplicity, you want immich. The lead dev designs the app specifically so his wife is happy using it, and it shows.

Immich is still in relatively active development, but has a great feature set and is the only app that could reasonably replace Google Photos for me. Can recommend!

immich, alternative for google photos. there's a demo portal for it.

Nothing beats Google Photos for me, personally.

So I bought a used Google Pixel 1 (first gen) and use Syncthing to sync my camera roll from my phone to the Pixel 1.

Google originally advertised the Pixel 1 as having unlimited cloud storage for life, so they have to stick to it. I don't pay for Google storage but I've got at least 500gb stored in Google Photos (including all my RAW photos and my digitised VHS tapes).

I'll abuse this system until the Pixel 1 dies and I can't get another one, then I'll cry.

I tested all of the top options listed on the FOSS photo galleries list. I settled on Immich, and so as of earlier today I currently have everything from GPhotos in Immich, with my phone backing up to both while I get my off-site backup set up. Immich has two drawbacks I consider minor enough for it to come out ahead, but major enough for it to still fall short of truly competing with GP. First, you can jnky select multiple things by tapping them one by one. No tap, hold, drag on mobile. No shift clicking on PC. Next, they have pretty good face recognition, but you can't...do anything with it? You can't set albums to auto add certain faces. You can't assign those people to contacts and auto share with them.

Jist moved from Photoprism to Immich. Glad i did. Mich better feature set, active development, and multi-user capability isn't locked behind a paid subscription.

PhotoStructure

Nextcloud but that's just because it happens to have photos on it. I've not got an alternative to Google photos yet (And I'm halfway through my bloody storage!)

I'm running Immich on an Odroid N2 and it's great! https://immich.app/

For iOS PhotoSync is great for backing up.

Immich for personal photos and pictures I take

Lychee as an image host for funny pictures, memes, and publically sharing photos

Nextcloud. It's definitely overkill for photos alone, but since you are likely to want it for other stuff anyway, why not use its gallery (which is decent) as well?

I personally use it for backup and sharing, and do the bulk of my photos/collections management in digikam (reading from a fast network storage).

Photoprism

If you have Prime and aren't insisting on self hosting: Amazon Photos gives you unlimited full quality photo backups.

samba/ftp?

Photoprism, running on a Raspberry Pi 4. I'm just running it as a single user, and it's been working well for that. A couple of notes:

• Video transcoding is a bit iffy on the rpi, but I'm running it under docker and might just move it all to a mini pc at some point
• I don't have it accessible publicly, but get to it online via Tailscale
• No app, but the Web interface is good.
• I'm currently running it in "read only" mode (mainly out of initial paranoia when trying it out, but it seems fine) so I have syncthing backing up the photos from my phone wirelessly and occasionally do an import of new images in.