If like me, you’ve been looking for an alternative to Google’s cloud-first and AI-first Photos app, this list should end your search. These are free and open-source apps without any ads or intrusive AI or cloud features.

ReFra

Gallery app done right

This is perhaps the closest you can get to the stock Google Photos experience with a polished open-source app. And it’s my favorite on this list.

On the first launch, it shows you all the permissions it needs and why. It needs media access for obvious reasons, including location permissions to read the location metadata in your media files (sometimes the camera app tags photos with the location they were captured).

After that quick setup, it drops you into the gallery, which feels a lot like a simplified version of Google Photos. You have a search bar at the top, next to a button for the favorites. There are three tabs at the bottom: one for the gallery view, one for the folders or albums, and another for shortcuts and categories (more on this in a few).

Flip through your gallery like Instagram stories

The gallery view also has these category carousels that I love. It shows on-device media split into folders and categories like nature, architecture, night, sunset, etc., depending on what’s in your gallery. Tapping on one of these cards lets you flip through its contents. It looks and works a lot like Instagram stories. You can tap the heart icon here to save any of the media in these story-like carousels to your favorites folder.

The gallery itself is segmented into a timeline, just like in Google Photos. Media from the current day and yesterday appear at the top, and the rest of the timeline follows it. The grid that showcases the media isn’t uniform. It dynamically resizes some of the thumbnails to break the monotony. I enjoy this off-kilter style, but if you prefer a straight-edge square grid, you can switch to that in the settings.

It has a satisfying built-in image editor

One feature that a lot of free and open-source (FOSS) gallery apps lack is a dedicated image editor. Even Immich (arguably the most popular gallery app in this category) doesn’t have its own image editor. But ReFra does.

You can tap the little pencil icon on any photo to open it. To me, it feels like a more pragmatic and elegant version of the Google Photos editor. You can crop, flip, and rotate photos with a single tap. Adjust brightness, tone, contrast, black or white point, shadows, and highlights with these satisfying sliders. To round the image adjustments off, the editor has similar sliders for saturation, warmth, skin tone, and blue tone. There are also some prebuilt filters. Annotate with text, highlighter, or pen. I don’t edit photos on my phone often, but this app makes me want to because it feels fun.

On-device intelligence for automatically sorting your collection

The album folder shows your folders as media collections. You can start your own collections too by adding albums to them.

There’s also one more feature that caught my eye that’s worth mentioning. You might have noticed that ReFra automatically creates these categories and sorts your media into them. It actually uses a local, on-device AI model to do that. If you grant ReFra, the network permission, it can download the model and intelligently create these categories for you. It is strictly opt-in and not enabled by default. The library works perfectly fine without network permissions.

Has a private vault

On the shortcuts tab, you’ll see tiles for opening the recycle bin, the favorites’ folder, and the vault. The vault can encrypt your media and let you access it via password or biometrics. Whatever you lock in this private folder will not show up in any other gallery app or system scan. You will only be able to access it via ReFra’s vault. The ignored folder is where you can add albums that you don’t want appearing in the main timeline or the collections tab.

There are tons of customization features so you can change how the timeline looks, where buttons appear, what the media viewer should look like, default screens, and so on. You can even turn the recycle bin off, so the media you delete is erased permanently right away.

ReFra is also stable and performant. It loads the files instantly and feels buttery smooth. It was a welcome surprise because some of the FOSS apps I tested felt really laggy and unpolished.

On the Play Store, this app is paid, but you can install it for free using the F-Droid store or the official GitHub repo.

8/10

CPU

Intel N95

Memory

8GB DDR5

Drive Bays

4x M.2 NVMe

Ports

5Gb/s Ethernet, USB-A, USB-C, HDMI 2.b

Bonus app #1: Fossify

Just a simple gallery app

Not everyone is a fan of Google Photos. Some might just want a basic, no-frills gallery app. If that’s you, your search might end with Fossify Gallery. This gallery is part of a bigger Fossify project that aims to replace the bloatware most Android manufacturers ship. There is a Fossify Phone, Calendar, Contacts, Messages, Music, Notes, Camera, Clock, and so on. The motivation behind the project is to simplify everyday Android apps. There are no trackers, ads, telemetry, or extra permission requests in these apps. In fact, they work completely offline, including the Fossify Gallery.

Like the rest of these Fossify apps, Fossify Gallery feels pretty lightweight and simple. When you open it, it’ll just show you your media folders. You can tap the image icon at the top to switch to the grid gallery view. There are some basic filters and sorting options. If you go into settings, you’ll see some customization options.

You can set a lock for the whole app for maximum privacy, but the media will still show up in other galleries and system scans. Fossify Gallery also lets you turn the recycling bin off. It even has a basic image editor for cropping and rotating images, but that’s all it can do.

For older phones or for someone who doesn’t want anything more than a basic gallery app, Fossify is the perfect choice.

Bonus app #2: Aves Library

Good for organizing large collections

For people who care more about organizing their media, Aves Libre is a great choice. It functions as a regular media gallery too, but where it shines the most is in its organization features. You can edit the image metadata, add your own tags to images, edit their location, and the date or time. It can even strip images of their metadata completely.

Swipe right to see lists of recently added files and tags. You can search and create collections based on these tags. You can even convert images on the fly to change their formats or dimensions. There is a map feature for seeing the exact coordinates of the photos. And there is a stats screen which shows you details like how many images you have, which formats they are, how much space each album is taking, etc.

For larger collections, this app should do a great job of organizing and tagging your media.

Flipping through the gallery lagged when I tested it on one of my older devices, but it worked fine on a newer phone. You might see this glitch too, so consider this a heads-up before you start organizing your gallery with Aves Libre.

ReFra should do nicely for most people

For a modern, everyday gallery app that’s private and offline, I could not find a better option than ReFra. However, if you want something more basic, give Fossify a try. For people who want to organize their large media collection, Aves Libre and these other FOSS apps will cut their work in half.