Slowly but surely trying to de google my life, but Google Photos is a hard one. I have a kid and seven pets, and I’ve come to rely on Google Photo’s search abilities to actually find anything I want to see in the hot mess of disorganized photos.
I tried a trial of Ente and filled it up to the free limit with pics. It was able to recognize my toddler in THREE photos, no one else. I don’t know how many or which photos are backed up because it doesn’t seem to show them separate from my un-backed up ones. It doesn’t learn to recognize pets as far as I can tell.
I’m too tired to learn to self host just to use Immich, even though I’ve heard good things, ha.
Sadly, all that glitz of Google comes at a price, basically selling your soul and your data bits. I use a linux desktop as my photo storage, so open source Syncthing backs up my photo folder to my PC, which in turn I have backed up to a hard drive in case of PC failure. Syncthing (open source) backs up any file or folder to any device via your wifi, used it for years. You can also use a Window$ PC as well, works on every platform. However, on Linux, I then use Digikam (open source) which has face recognition and a lot of the bells and whistles of photo storage and viewing, awesome program. Just my two cents.