State of De-Googling Part 2

Continuing on part 1 I want to run through some more Google services I’ve gotten rid of the last couple of years. For more about why you should probably head to part 1. I’ll also remind you that this mostly isn’t going to be a list of alternative cloud services as a big motivation is taking back control of my own data by selfhosting what I can.

De-Google take 2

Gmail to Protonmail To Migadu

Let’s start off with the exception to the selfhosting goal. Email has a notorious reputation in the selfhosting community due to how quickly you can end up on spam listings. While email is inherintly distributed as a technology, in practice a very big percentage of poeple you will be trying to deliver your mail to is going to be with a very select few providers. The big two are Gmail and some flavour of Outlook. That means that if either of these two decide to not deliver email from you properly you’re going to have a very bad time.

Selfhosting email is by no means impossible and in fact many people do, either for organizations or for personal use. However as most battle tested sysadmins in the space will tell you, it is something one has to keep a constant eye on, and should you end up on a block-list it can be a big pain to fix it. It’s not like Google or Microsoft has a support phone line open for these sorts of things. Should your IP-range (or domain) be blacklisted there’s a good chance you will be glad that particular fix is some one elses job that day. Also, a lot of the “bolted-on” security features of email like DKIM, SPF and DMARC can be a bit of a chore to wrap your head around and get right when setting everything up.

My first step in moving away from Gmail was to Protonmail. There’s a lot to like, and anyone looking for more of “suite” of tools may like that they have Calendar, Drive, Password manager and VPN offerings as well. I like their mission and highly suggest you check out if it is a fit for your use case.

Myself I moved on again, this time to Migadu. I wrote more about why here but in short I felt that some of the usability and interoperability tradeoffs of the fully encrypted approach of Proton wasn’t really worth it to me anymore. For example, using Thunderbird as an actual desktop email client again has been fantastic. I’m all for web applications, but sometimes there’s just nothing matching native speed.

The other thing Migadu allows me is limitless accounts, aliases, users etc. for my domains. They price themselves by storage and actual trafic, which not only makes sense because that’s where the cost is to them, but they are extremely chill about their tiers. If you are any kind of a normal user there’s a good chance their entry tier is more than suitable for you.

Client wise I’m using Thunderbird both on desktop and on mobile. Super happy with those!

Photos to Photoprism

A few years ago Google removed its unlimited free storage for photos and videos. That sparked a wave of people looking for alternatives and a few selfhosted options started popping up.

A few years later it seems like two main options have emerged in that space. Photoprism and Immich. At the time I made my choice Immich was under very active development with frequent and often breaking changes. I get it, it’s totally natural for a young project. They put it front and center on their Github and they seem to have handled that pretty well all in all. That said I landed on Photoprism at the time, I believe, because Immich didn’t support adopting an existing folder structure. I was not keen on changing my year/month/day folder structure and it became a deal breaker.

That said I believe that’s been resolved for a while now and people are really full of praise of Immich online so I might revisit it at some point. The only reason I haven’t yet is bacause Photoprism is a really solid piece of software that solves pretty much everything I need for now. I’ve seen it mentioned as superiour for large collections that needs managing, while Immich might have even more of the cool features that people loved from Google Photos.

I would check out both, and maybe even run them in parallell for a while if I was starting from scratch again.

For syncing photos to my server I’ve set up Photosync on my and my wife’s phones. I also have a camera that I offload photos from by plugging my SD card into the computer and running:

find /media/SDCARD/DCIM/100CANON/ -type f \( -name "*.JPG" -o -name ".MP4" -o -name "*.CR3" \) -mtime -10 -print0 | rsync -av --files-from=- --from0 / server:/mnt/path/to/photoprism_imports/.

This little oneliner finds any jpg, mp4 or CR3 (Canon compressed raw format) file created the last 10 days and syncs them to my ingestion folder. From there Photoprism takes over and does it’s thing. Including putting it into a year/month/day folder structure.

Now what?

I think there’s enough yet to cover for a part three. Keeping these posts bite-sized helps me get them out without spending too much time which is motivating, and hopefully it helps anyone stumbling upon this to actually finish an article before going on with their day.

If that’s you - I hope you have a good one!