I dumped Google photos for self hosted immich and it's been great. Not sure if it has the ability to connect to photo frames but if you already self host anything else it's not too much work to setup.
It's really not that heavy. I have Immich - and several other services - running on a 4-core VM with 16GB RAM, running on 7th gen Intel hardware alongside another 4c/16GB VM and several LXC containers. It does the job just fine with more than enough overhead.
Self hosted doesn't necessarily mean hosted at home. Some of my stuff is for example hosted in a French datacenter for redundancy. At one point it was my only server space since hosting at home wasn't feasible at that time.
I'm still salty about them discontinuing synchronization between Google photos and Google drive years ago. Such an unnecessary and irritating move. Before that it was getting rid of the picassa desktop app which was actually quite a good photo library manager. The enshitification marches on.
This API changes takes away the reason I pay for Google One storage so I can cancel it.
If I understand the article correctly I can move to iPhone to keep a similar feature, I just need to heart s photo to add it.
Might as well abandon Google altogether.
Well, you are going to have to trust someone to store your offsite backup unless you can afford a second house somewhere. It should be a backup service where you can encrypt the data before uploading it though.
Sidenote, are these frames any good? Aura seems to advertise on a few podcasts I listen to but I’m curious how people in the real world feel about them
I can tell you it's a very good digital picture frame for my needs that gets less convenient with this change by Google.
I have one and gave one to my parents. This feature allows everyone with access to a shared Google photo album to contribute without an extra account or software and my parents get pictures of their grandchildren and what not.
Also since the frame does nothing else but display pictures and play short videos it only needs to be plugged in and it does it's thing.
It is quite wonderful to be honest. It is a shame that Google is taking this joy away.