I use FreshRss, which I know doesn't help OP, but I still love it. I get images worth most posts on my feed, assuming the article has one. Just saying...

I use Feeder which has been awesome so far for me

Use the app news

It uses RSS and shows it with nice pictures. You can even open the webpage directly, if you tap on a news.

Works as standalone RSS Reader, or with Nextcloud. I recommend standalone, the nextcloud news app seems outdated 🤔

OPML feed import and export are included

I built my own, it doesnt do what you ask, but it does what I want 🙂

https://sturlabragason.github.io/blog/2023/06/15/Curated-News.html

Google Reader was the best. Not sure why Google killed it, but it was really good at both content discovery and keeping up with sites you're interested in. I tried several alternatives but nothing came close, so I gave up and hung out more on forums / link aggregators like slashdot, hacker news, reddit and now lemmy for content discovery. I'm also interested to hear what others use.

TT-RSS has worked well for me since Google Reader was killed.

I use Feedly. It’s not Google News, but it works well, the mobile app is great, and it’s not going to be killed on a whim.

I use FreshRSS in combination with FiveFilters and RSS-Bridge to get full articles, instead of just snippets, and filter out content I already know I have no interest in.

Nextcloud news is alright

I'm digging Pluma on my android as a 2ndary to GF.

For RSS I like ReadYou, for feeds I like Mastodon with a variety of interests followed. There are a surprising number of orgs on Mastodon these days.

I've been using Inoreader for few years and there is no single thing I could complain about. It's good enough that I'm considering buying a subscription.

It’s not self hosted, but I spent some time curating the news feed on Bing. It works well enough that I felt comfortable switching from Google Feed, and I don’t have to worry about self-hosting random news feeds.

Hi, I also use freshhrss. Self hosted, low maintenance.

No problem with the images and the feed is quite consistent if you just tag and manage subscriptions in an ordered manner.

I recommended you to organice your feeds being consistent in what do you want to see in the "main stream".

P.s. also activate "mark as read" "while scrolling". If any site dumps a bunch of consecutive articles I just mark that stream as read and move on.

Good luck!

since it sounds like you're talking android maybe, with the pixel feed on the left of the home screen, I just switched to the neo launcher + neo feed [1] this week and it's been working great. the launcher is a pretty good open source nova-like launcher on it's own, but the feed is just an RSS reader that is on the left of the home screen like Google would be. it's been super nice to have that similar feed but with my chosen data.

as for images, you should def have some. there are feeds that don't include it, like techcrunch, but most do. you can try the verge or rockpapershotgun as examples.

[1] https://github.com/NeoApplications/Neo-Feed

I use Feeder

I'm on macOS and iOS and love News Explorer. It syncs my reading progress to all other devices and also has a nice reader mode that pulls the article from the website in full. Apart from that it's pretty bare-bones, but does exactly what I want.