The best Google Photos alternatives in 2027, compared
People search for a Google Photos alternative for one of two reasons: storage prices, or who can see the photos. The tools below solve different mixes of those problems, so this is less a ranking than a map. I will say up front that we build one of the options, PixelUnion, and I will try to earn the recommendation by being specific about the others.
The comparison criteria are the ones that actually change your experience: where your data legally lives, what the service can read, price per terabyte, and whether daily features like search and face grouping survive the move. What the AI training and ad-related terms look like at Google is covered separately in the post on what Google does with your photos, so I will keep the focus on alternatives here.
The shortlist
PixelUnion. Hosted Immich on European servers, run by a two-person team in the Netherlands. Full Immich feature set: search, face grouping, automatic phone backup, shared albums. Pricing per storage tier, with the whole library under EU jurisdiction. The obvious tradeoff: it is not free, and the team is small, which cuts both ways for support quality and bus factor. Our European alternative to Google Photos post goes deeper.
Ente. End-to-end encrypted photo storage with a strong open source reputation. The company is US-incorporated, but the servers holding your (encrypted) photos are in Europe. Encryption means the servers cannot read your photos, which is the strictest privacy model on this list. The cost of that: server-side search and face grouping work differently or not at all, since the server never sees the content. Good fit if E2EE matters more to you than server-side smarts.
Proton Drive. From the Proton suite. E2EE as well, and the appeal is bundling with mail and calendar if you are leaving the Google ecosystem wholesale. Photo-specific features like face grouping and memories are thinner than the dedicated photo services. Good fit as part of a full switch, less so as a pure Google Photos replacement.
Zeitkapsl. Austrian team, end-to-end encrypted, EU-only infrastructure split across two data centers. The interesting part is that search and face recognition still work, because the matching runs locally on your device before anything encrypted leaves it, rather than on a server that can read your files. That is a real way around the usual E2EE-versus-search tradeoff, at the cost of using more of your phone’s storage and battery for indexing. Has a Google Photos migration tool built in. Pricier than PixelUnion at the 2 TB tier.
Self-hosted Immich. The software PixelUnion runs, on your own hardware. Maximum control, no subscription, and the full feature set. Costs: a machine that stays on, updates, and backups you own, which is more real work than people expect. The self-hosting risks post covers this honestly, and how PixelUnion runs hosted Immich is the middle path.
Synology Photos. If you already own a Synology NAS, this is effectively free and local. Features are solid but a generation behind Immich on search. It keeps your photos in your house, which is either the most private option on the list or a single point of failure, depending on your fire alarm.
iCloud. Not private in the strict sense, and US jurisdiction, but it is the default for iPhone users for a reason: it works seamlessly. Whether Apple can actually see your photos is its own question, covered in the Google Photos vs iCloud vs PixelUnion comparison. I include it because “alternative to Google Photos” sometimes just means “the thing I already pay for”.
How they compare
| Jurisdiction | Encryption | Search / faces | Price for ~2 TB | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PixelUnion | EU | Provider-encrypted | Yes | €9.95/mo |
| Ente | US company, EU servers | End-to-end | Limited by E2EE | ~€20/mo |
| Proton Drive | Switzerland | End-to-end | No | ~€10-13/mo |
| Zeitkapsl | Austria, EU | End-to-end | Yes, on-device | ~€26/mo |
| Self-hosted Immich | Yours | You configure | Yes | Hardware + power |
| Synology Photos | Yours | None by default | Basic | NAS hardware |
| iCloud | US | Provider, opt-in E2EE | Yes, on-device | ~€10/mo |
Prices move often, so treat the last column as an order of magnitude rather than a quote. One note on the E2EE rows: encryption is real and valuable, and the “limited search” column is usually the honest price of it. Zeitkapsl is the exception, doing its matching on-device instead of on the server, which is a genuinely different answer to that tradeoff rather than a loophole. Server-side search at Google’s scale is still a different thing, but it is the closest any option here gets to having both.
Which one for whom
If you want to leave Google but keep the experience, hosted Immich or self-hosted Immich are the closest matches. If the priority is that nobody at all can read your photos but you still want search, Zeitkapsl. If E2EE matters more than search, Ente or Proton. If you already have a NAS, Synology Photos costs nothing extra. If you want everything in one encrypted suite and photos are secondary, Proton Drive.
Migration effort is similar for all of them: export from Google, fix the metadata, upload. That process is the same regardless of destination, and our Google Photos export guide covers the trap in Takeout exports. Data sovereignty, the reason jurisdiction is a column here, gets its own explainer in the data sovereignty post.
I will note our own bias in closing: we think photo libraries belong under European law with a party you can email, and that is the product we built. But five of the seven options above are good products by people we respect. Any of them beats staying somewhere your photos are the fuel.