Monument 2: A privacy focused alternative to Google Photos

Monument 2 is a privacy focused smart photo storage device that aims to provide a secure alternative to Google Photos. Monument 2 provides a comprehensive suite of features to centralize and manage photos while keeping your personal data private and without paying any monthly fees. Monument promises to deliver a clutter free, seamless photo management experience for secure sharing and storage of your photos.

Is Monument 2 really an alternate to Google Photos?

Google Photos is one of the most beloved photo sharing and storage services as it reached 1 billion users after just four years of initial announcement and over 1.2 billion photos are uploaded to the service every day. With any Google service, there are always concerns about data privacy, but users were willing to make the privacy compromise for a valuable service at no cost. Google recently announced that as of June 1, 2021, Google Photos will no longer offer unlimited storage for free and the total space would be limited to 15 GB for your photos and videos. With this new storage limit, we expect that consumers will no longer find Google Photos appealing if they are forced to pay a monthly fee (2TB for $10/month) for storage of their photos.

This is where Monument 2 comes in as it combines portability of an external hard drive with cloud service to offer a smart photo storage and management experience. Monument 2 automatically backs up and organizes all of your photos and videos from all platforms including iOS, Android, Mac, PC and Linux. With Monument, users are not locked into a single platform and can share content across all devices including Windows, Android, Mac and iOS.

We created Monument as we have become target of companies to mine and sell our private data. So, we set out to build the best photo management experience while keeping users’ needs in center, not their personal data.

Monument 2 provides a cloud-level experience while protecting privacy and without requiring any monthly fees. Monument uses a powerful processor that includes a built-in Neural Processing Unit, also known as NPU to analyze content to recognize faces, scenery and other properties locally, on device. Monument 2 brings a cloud level experience with all new features such as similarity detection, USB 3.0, dual band WiFi, built-in SD card reader, TV out and remote access capabilities.

Monument 2: Technical Specifications

Pricing and Availability

Monument 2 has launched on Kickstarter after a successful campaign back in 2017, which managed to attract more than 20,000 users. Monument 2 is now available for pre-orders on Kickstarter with an exclusive price of $169 for user upgradable diskless storage and $299 for 1TB SSD model. Monument 2 will be shipped to its backers starting from May 2021.