While it won't yet solve all your backup needs (still early days), a few friends and I have been working on a privacy focused competitor of sorts for Google Photos, but a bit easier to share your albums with friends and family. It is free for the time being, but it will be a paid solution as you're not paying with your data. It's also E2E encrypted. While all photos are currently hosted by us, we're also exploring letting you to connect the app to your own cloud or storage solution for those that want full control. If you're interested it's called StoryArk https://storyark.eu/
Some of my fantasy thoughts about a photo storage service:
Can I ask Siri, Google, Alexa (or any smart assistant) when was the last 3 times I saw ____?
Can it show me emails, photos, tweets, etc of the related meetings/events?
Can I take a photo or upload a photo of someone and provide as many details as possible? In relation to me personally and them alone as a person?
Can it be a celebrity or a person from the past (no longer living) and it could try to see a connection, related things, etc?
Would this also be helpful for parties, weddings, funerals, and more?
Could I ask it to try to find a relation between two people?
Can a timeline or photos help to tell a story? Act as a guide or reference? Add more clarity to situations/events? Could we offer this as an addon to weddings and other events? Can we create a linear timeline of photos, dates, times and locations?
Could we also show related influences? Like songs, albums, family history or tree.
Topics to disable: lyrics, alcohol, ??
How to access/merge other apple photo accounts? AI photo collage, web based, download as video or PPT
Thanks you for sharing - these are interesting ideas.
At the moment we're focused on how we can tie together shared events and memories of your personal story (hence the name) into one place. Currently this is primarily from photos, but as you've suggested there is a lot one can do with how those photos are connected to time, location, each other, and other possible connections. This is what I see missing in most photo backup tools, since they're primarily archival and aren't designed to tie ephemera together into a permanent catalog of your experiences.
