Another great article from 404 Media highlighting the power that the tech giants have amassed over how how we use the internet.
This brings me, I think, to the elephant in the room, which is the fact that Google has its hands on quite literally every aspect of this entire saga as a vertically integrated adtech giant.
This extreme power over the adtech and online advertising ecosystem is one of the subjects of an FTC antitrust suit against Google.
for photos there is immich. they also have a guide to import photos from gphotos.
context: immich is a selfhosted app, with fully functional web view and app. the app can do background backups. there are ML jobs configurable on the server to search anything, and have faces of people aggregated.