Software engineer Vishnu Mohandas decided he would quit Google in more ways than one when he learned that the tech giant had briefly helped the US military develop AI to study drone footage. In 2020 he left his job working on Google Assistant and also stopped backing up all of his images to Google Photos. He feared that his content could be used to train AI systems, even if they weren’t specifically ones tied to the Pentagon project. “I don’t control any of the future outcomes that this will enable,” Mohandas thought. “So now, shouldn’t I be more responsible?”
The site (TheySeeYourPhotos) returns what Google Vision is able to decern from photos. You can test with any image you want or there are some sample images available.
Just as someone already mentioned in this thread, I can vouch for Immich as well. I self host it (currently via Umbrel on a Pi 5 purely for simplicity) and the duplicate detection feature is very handy.
Oh, and the AI face detection feature is great for finding all the photos you have of a given person, but it sometimes screws up and thinks the same person is two different people, but it allows you to merge them anyways, so it’s fine.
The interface is great, there’s no paywalled features (although they do have a “license,” which is purely a donation) and it generally feels pretty slick.
I would warn to anyone considering trying it that it is still in heavy development, and that means it could break and lose all your photos. Keep backups, 3-2-1 rule, all that jazz.