From Google Photos to PixelUnion: Our Journey to a European Tech Alternative

In this post, I shared my quest to ‘de-Americanize’ my digital life. With recent geopolitical shifts between the US and EU, I’ve been motivated to reduce my reliance on big tech. I’ve swapped Google Drive for Nextcloud, replaced Google Search with Ecosia, and even switched to Zoho Mail. But one major service remained: Google Photos.

Finding a European alternative to Google Photos has been challenging. While there are other drive options, and Nextcloud could technically store my photos, none of them offer the same seamless experience for viewing and storing memories.

Then I discovered Immich, an open-source alternative to Google Photos. I was genuinely impressed. Immich offers fantastic features like a timeline, facial recognition, and the ability to search for objects in your photos. It’s a powerful piece of software that truly rivals Google Photos.

However, Immich has its challenges. It’s complex to set up and scale, requiring components like Redis and Postgres with a vector plugin—not something everyone can easily manage. This complexity sparked the idea for PixelUnion, a user-friendly, scalable, EU-based alternative to Google Photos built on Immich.

PixelUnion will offer photo storage within the EU, with tiered storage options ranging from 100GB to 500GB and beyond. Our goal is to provide a free tier and competitive pricing that can rival Google Drive.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been busy building the PixelUnion platform, using cloud-native tools to ensure it’s scalable, reliable, and secure. I’ve also teamed up with a friend to handle the business side, and we’re almost ready to launch our closed beta test.

We’ll be offering 500GB of free storage to our beta testers for at least the duration of the beta. If you’d like to join us on this journey, let me know in the comments or via a DM, and I’ll get you started once the beta begins!