By Abhinav Raj
Publication Date: 2026-08-23 10:00:00
There’s a simple question you might’ve asked before heading into this article. “What’s actually wrong with Google Photos?” For many years, it was the storage limits that kept getting tighter, the shrinking free tiers, and the added monthly cost of paying for one subscription after another. Today, there’s an even more compelling reason to leave the ad giant’s ecosystem.
Google has silently expanded AI training on user media across a variety of its services, and it often opts people in by default through settings that sit outside the Web & App Activity controls. There’s a chance that your photos are being used as training data for Google’s expanding suite of AI models unless you go looking for the switch that opts you out.
At the very same time, self-hosting is free and more accessible than ever. Most users are deterred from it assuming they’d need a dedicated home server running Linux, a weekend to set it all up, and a tolerance for forum threads. I was able to self-host a…
