Google Photos is arguably the most popular photo storage and sharing service. AI tagging, easy sharing, cloud access, and unlimited storage - google photos had it all, at least until google announced the end of "Free Unlimited storage".
Now that the free unlimited storage is going to stop, users will have to find an alternative. We have long believed that public cloud should not be the only home for your photos or any other data for that matter, so we are not going to propose you a public cloud alternative, we would rather show you the benefits of owning your private cloud
Yes, owning a NAS ( e.g. a Synology, QNAP, or Asustor) is your wisest choice, and here is why
Your own private Cloud
With a NAS, you own a device that stays in your network, and you can access it anywhere in the world - that's called a private cloud. A Public could in contrast is akin to amazon keeping a NAS in their datacenter and offering you access to it ( Yes we oversimplified but you get the idea)
You control your NAS
A NAS that's physically in your Custody is as much control as you can get. You don't have to worry about where your data is stored. it's always right with you.
No Recurring Fees
Decide how much storage you want. Buy a NAS that gives you the scalability for future expansion and you have a single predictable amount, which gets you a unit for life. No recurring charges ever.
Share, Use AI, Personalize your Own portal
All the major NAS vendors give you granularized access control, option to share with guests, and AI processing ( for face recognition and auto AI Tagging of objects). Honestly, AI is not at par with Google, it just can't be. But enough to keep you happy.
Not only photos; stream movies, download torrents, host your site...
NAS are extremely versatile devices and can not only be used to store your photos. You can save all kinds of data, run Plex server and stream your movies, have a virtual machine running on it, run your blog off the machine, etc, etc... it's a small server and if you have time and passion you can configure it to be anything.
Mix Public and Private cloud
If you have multiple public clouds, you can also use your NAS to syncroinze all the clouds. Keep a copy of your photos on google photos , keep the older ones on Dropbox , office files on NAS and Amazon S3 for example.
