European alternatives to Google Photos

Google Photos is Google’s photo and video backup service, announced in May 2015 as the standalone successor to the photo features of Google+. Its phone app uploads the camera roll in the background, and the library it builds is searchable by what is in the pictures: people grouped by face, places, objects and text. Shared albums, partner sharing, an editor and automatically generated memories sit on top.

Storage is the 15 GB free quota that Photos shares with Gmail and Google Drive. Free unlimited storage at reduced quality ended on 1 June 2021; beyond 15 GB the route is a paid Google One plan.

On 16 October 2026 Google changed its privacy policy. It used to say Google did not show personalized ads based on content from Drive, Gmail or Photos. It now adds “unless you choose to make data from these services available to other Google services that support personalized ads”, which covers connecting Photos to Search and Gemini through Personal Intelligence. When Google widened that feature in April 2026, it left out the EEA, Switzerland and the UK.

What makes Photos hard to leave is the index rather than the files. Google Takeout exports the images, but the face groups and the search do not travel with them. The European alternatives below either rebuild that organisation on a paid plan or give up content search in exchange for end-to-end encryption.