I wrote this comprehensive guide about how to handle Google Takeout in order to export your Google Photos before Google’s free high quality photo storage goes away next year and how to subsequently make your export usable. It’s intended for all audiences, but the overall message skews toward de-googling.
It also includes a link to a program I wrote to help people trying to take the steps in the post so they can skip the hard work if they want. :)
I moved from Google photos to my personal Nextcloud about a year ago. Nextcloud is great (except for the past month I’ve been stuck in malformed server configuration hell on my phone without time to troubleshoot). I do miss the ability gphotos has for the ML-enabled “search by objects in the photo” sometimes though.
Anyway, nice work describing the process for more casual computer users who may be wishing to degoogle a bit.