I’ve only been using it since… well… since I posted this. But so far the experience is great! They have an easy guide for migrating from Google Photos (basically they can import a Takeout export directly).
I’ve got it installed on my phone with automatic backups enabled. It had no issues with duplicates from both Takeout and the existing photos on my phone. (I even did the upload twice due to running out of space the first time, and there were no dupes). The app has a pretty similar design to Google Photos, so it feels familiar. It also supports Google’s version of “live photos”.
You can create links to share albums or individual photos, and you can also add people to your plan.
I enabled the local machine learning analysis and, while it’s not perfect, it does make for a pretty nice searching experience.
P.S. I promise this is not an ad! I’m running out of Google storage and figured this was as good a time as any to de-Google my photos. Ente came up as a frequent cloud solution. If you’re looking for self-hosted, Immich is far and away the most popular.