Ask HN: How do you privately share pictures and video with family and friends?

iMessage and iCloud Photo Sharing

This might be what you are looking for if you are into self-hosting or at least have trusted host.

https://pixelfed.org/

Mainly email/whatsapp/iMessage

There is Syncthing of course [0], which is quite easy to set up. Also if you need your storage to be always online, there's rclone [1].

Some privacy focused mail providers (like mailbox.org) have cloud capabilities too.

[0] https://syncthing.net/

[1] https://rclone.org/

We use WhatsApp, which I don't really trust but if I'm sharing a picture to my family I don't expect each member to keep it in a vault.

Is there an appetite for something like an instagram/snap, but closed/paid/private? I'm working on something _similar_ for the education, but I also use it for my extended family. Wouldn't be hard to spin up a group if you're interested (unrulr.com). I'm will@ if you want to chat.

What about a self hosted nextcloud/owncloud server? It will be easy to manage on all devices.

Print out pictures on my printer and mail them.

Within my family I use Peergos for sharing photos and videos. Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder. Individual files or entire folders can be shared securely in band, or via a secret link. Everything is E2EE including metadata. e.g. here is a secret link to some media files:

https://alpha.peergos.net/#%7B%22secretLink%22:true%2c%22lin...

https://app.ardrive.io - ArDrive

For full privacy, compress the files with password enabled and share it using your mail. That should do the trick.

Google Photos with shared albums, works great for my family & friends.

It used to be impossible for everyone to get all the photos after a vacation / trip / event. Now we just create a shared album and everyone upload everything.

Edit: WhatsApp biggest flaw is the aggressive compression. It takes pictures down to an unacceptable qualify.

iCloud shared albums is what we use. Easy and I believe it to be as private as you can reasonably get with a cloud platform.

Telegram

Discord for sharing and multi-person audio/video. Content is accessible to Discord itself, of course, but not to the uninvited. Don't need an email address. Works on desktop, tablet, phones.

https://discord.com/ about: https://www.protocol.com/discord

I use my own nextcloud instance for that. I can either get a share link, or set a password for access.

23snaps. Great for keeping extended family up to date with photos of the kids while being far more privacy oriented than other options. I've been using it for 5 years and highly recommend it. https://www.23snaps.com/

I set up a Mastodon instance and a Peertube instance on my own server and got all everyone onto Mastodon. They all get how to use Mastodon, including the seniors, so that's what most people engage with. Peertube videos can be easily embedded into toots so both pics and videos are shareable.

I also have a Nextcloud instance and have all photos and videos auto uploaded, then recently Nextcloud introduced some workflow features that I used to auto upload all videos from Nextcloud to Peertube, making it really easy to go pick the video link and share.

What I've found is that better quality photos and videos tend to make it into Mastodon and Peertube, while other content will still be shared in the Signal group chat.

It's all running in docker, making it easy to upgrade, backup, and/or move around.

Beaker browser[1], previously Tox[2], previously Opera Unite (dead)[3]. Sharing content with competent, but not expert, computer user(s). On desktop only; while seemingly a downside, privacy and tracking concerns may lead to exclude major mobile OSs.

[1]: https://beakerbrowser.com/

[2]: https://tox.chat/

[3]: https://maqentaer.com/devopera-static-backup/http/dev.opera....

Signal

Self hosted on a Synology server. Custom domain, ddns, Letsencrypt certificate.