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cyberpanther
I switched to a personal NAS that has ML categorization: https://www.walmart.com/ip/seort/184909893

I think the Synology NAS do the same.

mceachen
You're certainly welcome to try PhotoStructure! It's got very robust de-duplication, supports portable libraries (so you can automatically sweep your photos scattered across many drives and computers into a single timestamped folder structure), and a novel UI showing a random sampled view of your library.

There's also an active forum for both support and to discuss what and how new features are built out.

https://photostructure.com/

Disclaimer: I'm the (only) author.

nexuist
Thank you for building this. I was thinking of building my own but I think I'll try this out!
Aeolun
Oh. Deduplication across all drives! Consider me interested. Will try this out later.
mceachen
I had boxes and boxes of old drives that I wanted to get organized which drove that feature: https://photostructure.com/about/introducing-photostructure/...

It's also why I implemented bitrot detection and metadata inference. A beta tester just called the date parsing heuristics "freaking awesome and so close to black magic…" :)

https://forum.photostructure.com/t/combining-images/524/7

(And if you prefer the command line, know you can do tons of things via the CLI: https://photostructure.com/server/tools/ )

tompagenet2
Hey, PhotoStructure looks amazing. I'm intrigued. How and when does bitrot detection work? I couldn't find it on your site. I spend a decent amount of time making PAR2 volumes so I can detect failures as I've not come up with a better idea.
Vaslo
I have an unRaid server and I found your app to be the easiest to use, but I had to switch to photo prism because you don’t have an easy way to tell the difference between photos and videos.

I know you previously responded that people should upvote that feature, but the inability to distinguish video from photo just seems like a must have fix over other potentially over engineered stuff that others are asking for.

kingosticks
I really didn't have much luck with the de-duplication. I tried photostructure for about 3 weeks and since stopped. I was trying to pull photos from multiple different drives/folders into one central organised place. A few issues:

  - The de-duplication didn't seem to work, it at least was defeated by my messy files. I spent many hours manually going through the results and finding many dupes. Then I lost interest in doing that and gave up.
Edit: I've just realised, was this (by design) simply copying each photo into the merged tree but then if I browse using the photostructure app it will hide the dupes? Can I prevent it making a copy? I want to use other file/photo browsers also.

  - can't use datestamp info in the filename?

  - very, very slow to sync from my external USB 3 drive. I'd be happy with that if the de-duplication worked. Also the status about what it's doing seems sporadic and half the time appears to be doing nothing at all. Maybe my laptop is too slow? 
 
  - no map view
I did like the feed of random photos. I saw loads of great old snaps I'd forgotten about. Somewhat bizarrely, when I wanted to share them quickly with others I ended up taking a photo of the photo(s) with my smartphone and sharing that via WhatsApp. That's more my failing but it did seem a bit silly that I resorted to doing that.
mceachen
> if I browse using the PhotoStructure app it will guide the dupes

Yes: out of an abundance of caution, the unique (by SHA) variations of each asset are copied into your library. There are heuristics that pick which is the "best," and although those heuristics seem to be robust for most beta users, I didn't want to be the source of want data loss.

> datestamp info in the filename?

The metadata in the file is trusted more than any date extracted either from the filename or the directory hierarchy. Details are here: https://photostructure.com/faq/captured-at/

If you use the info tool, it'll tell you how it's extracting the date from any given file: https://photostructure.com/server/tools/#file-information

> slow to sync

PhotoStructure scales imports to accommodate current hardware, in Ann effort to keep the system responsive. Parallelism is limited by available RAM and CPU count. If you think it was being too conservative, please send me a screen shot of your about page (it includes both system metrics and what is thinking for scheduling limits), and if you want, debug logs, and we can look into what's going on. https://photostructure.com/faq/error-reports/#how-to-manuall...

> no map view

This is a popular feature request that I'm looking forward to building: https://forum.photostructure.com/t/support-reverse-geocoding...

kingosticks
The metadata for some of my filew is total junk. If I used another tool to strip that bad metadata would it then use the datestamps in the filename? I think this was defeating the de-duplication also. In an ideal world I'd be able to configure everything from a particular source folder to use filename datestamps.
mceachen
Yes: you can use `exiftool -all: $file` to strip all metadata, but please have backups before you do anything: ExifTool is both powerful and fast.
JamesDeepDown
WARNING! Be aware that this is an Electron app. I tried it, and using the interface was like swimming in glue. I presumed this meant "Electron app" and a quick check confirmed it.
LeoPanthera
I would particularly be interested in self-hosted solutions that still support image recognition, which is very useful for large libraries. Does such a thing even exist?
derefr
If you use macOS, you can use Apple Photos (with its client-side image recognition) without using iCloud for storage. Just put your Photo Library bundle-directory on a NAS instead, and then either sync it to your local machine, or work with it over SMB.

(Or, for optimal performance, the hybrid solution: put the library in a sparsebundle disk image, put that on the NAS, and then mount the disk image over SMB. This is what Time Machine does under the covers, because it vastly improves the overhead of filesystem operations over directly manipulating the files in SMB.)

thekyle
Windows also has Microsoft Photos which does client-side indexing of people, places, and objects.
LeoPanthera
This is what I currently do, but it doesn't expose the output of the object recognition to me. You have to guess what objects it might be able to recognize, and then search for them. I'd rather have the raw data.

(It's also frustrating that the VoiceOver image recognition is far superior to Photos', but is inaccessible to the Photos app.)

Snuupy
Take a look at nextcloud photos and photoprism.
lazyant
is there a front-end (visualization, tagging, upload, dedup etc) where we can use a cloud service backend (AWS S3 etc)?
dkasper
Why not just pay for google photos?
happytoexplain
They've clearly indicated a desire to try another platform. Why does it matter what the motivation is?
kyle_morris_
OP mentioned that google is ending the free version, it makes sense to ask them why they don’t pay.

If the reason is because they want a free tier forever, that impacts the recommendation. If the reason is because they think google could shut you out, that may need a completely different recommendation.

joshmn
Well, for one, if Google's ML decides to nuke your account, you lose your photos unless you have a blog, a lot of upvotes, and luck.
marticode
This is gonna be a risk with most cloud services. No matter what, you want to have a backup anyway.
crossroadsguy
Because they are known for bait and switch; and even worse bait and shutdown? One bad click, or their AI screwing up might lock you out of all your photos and entire Google a/c? Among numerous other reasons.

So while at it move away from one more Google service.

Gustomaximus
Is the bait an switch comment fair? Google have offered free photos for years and obviously the storage requirements must be growing huge. A business needs to be able to change.

Also haven't they said on both the big changes anything in the past will be held as legacy under free and future uploads will go to storage? I think you have to accept business needs to adapt models sometimes and Google Photos is more this than bait and switch.

Fair call on the lockout. This is a real issue for Google.

rrrhys
They starved out any other provider who could offer photo storage with their free storage. Now they discover they need to charge for it.
risyachka
Is there any convenient way to back up Google Photos to Backblaze or S3?
jeffbee
Sure, just get a google takeout of your photos data, and whatever else you want backed up, and stick it in S3.
fennecfoxen
Adobe Lightroom (Classic).

Yes, you pay real money for the stupid cloud model, but — I can add gradient and circular filters, correct for the lens distortion with profiles for most major cameras and lenses (including your iPhone), get one-click perspective correction so a building facade is square against the image plane ... and it's all lossless editing.

You want a map of your photos over time? Of course we have the map. You want facial recognition but locally hosted so it's not creepy? Got ya covered.

There's a cloud-oriented Lightroom these days. I don't use it and don't look forward to when they stop supporting Classic so I'll have to ... switch away yes that's definitely what I'll do 100%

robenkleene
For the record, I don't think Adobe is ever moving away from Lightroom Classic. I think the naming is a bit of a mirage, or more specifically a way to push consumers towards a more valuable (charge for cloud storage), less demanding (objectively less capable), product. A customer paying for Classic and CC, and only using CC is a better customer for Adobe.

But the problem is Adobe Lightroom CC has effectively zero penetration with professional photographers. If I had to summarize the pro market opinion of CC, it would be contempt. Here's an example: This article (https://petapixel.com/2020/01/02///why-im-sticking-with-ligh...), about choosing Classic over CC, has about 100 comments, the maximum allowed, most panning CC. Of those 100, it's easy to find the single positive comment about CC: it's at the bottom, with the most downvotes.

The problem is the whole basis of CC (cloud storage) is antithetical to how professional photographers work (thousands of large photos per shoot). Adobe can't grow CC into eventually supporting this market because it can't support offline storage, because the whole reason CC exists is to have a product that's cloud only...

So I think Adobe will effectively be supporting Classic forever. Here's an example: Adobe has committed to native support for Classic on Apple Silicon (https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/kb/macos-big-sur-c...).

snowwrestler
I wonder how long Adobe is going to care about professional photographers for Lightroom. That sounds crazy, I know, but I would bet that the percentage of Lightroom users who are actual working pros is tiny and shrinking. At some point it will be more profitable for Adobe to abandon that tiny and demanding customer group to some other company and focus on prosumers with Lightroom CC.

Pros who need Photoshop will still need Adobe. There is nothing remotely close to replacing Photoshop. And AFAIK, every Lightroom competitor ships with an “open this file in Photoshop” button.

Apple did this with Final Cut. After years of being proud that Real Hollywood Films were edited with Final Cut, they gave up Hollywood and pivoted the product firmly toward prosumers. It has not hurt Apple at all, and probably saved them some money and heartache along the way.

robenkleene
> I wonder how long Adobe is going to care about professional photographers for Lightroom. That sounds crazy, I know, but I would bet that the percentage of Lightroom users who are actual working pros is tiny and shrinking. At some point it will be more profitable for Adobe to abandon that tiny and demanding customer group to some other company and focus on prosumers with Lightroom CC.

This is theoretically possible, but I'd bet against it because of the brand halo effect of having Lightroom Classic be the main tool of professional photographers is too valuable. The second Adobe discontinues Lightroom Classic, the professional market will move to Capture One. That's a dangerous position for Adobe to be in. I wouldn't put it past Adobe to still make this mistake (e.g., see Figma), but I think if they did, it would be a mistake so large that it would shape the future of Adobe as a company. I.e., Adobe will be weaker forever if they do this.

> Apple did this with Final Cut. After years of being proud that Real Hollywood Films were edited with Final Cut, they gave up Hollywood and pivoted the product firmly toward prosumers. It has not hurt Apple at all, and probably saved them some money and heartache along the way.

I do not think Apple is happy about the way Final Cut Pro X turned out. The feedback to Final Cut Pro X was so bad that Steve Jobs personally called Randy Ubillos about it (source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfII0EcbCsg). That's the only time I've ever heard of Steve Jobs getting involved with one of Apple's pro apps.

Consider this: Look at the Mac Pro and in particular, the Pro Display XDR. Which industry were those products made to placate? Do you think Apple is happy that video studios that once would have been running their software on those machines are now running Avid/Premiere? Plus look at the corresponding roll out of Logic Pro X two years later, which was far less of re-imagining than Final Cut Pro X was. I think Apple has learned their lesson. "Success hides problems", from 2010-2020 made some colossally terrible decisions, that we only talk about less because the iPhone has compensated for so much, Final Cut Pro X is one of them.

joshmn
I use a Synology[0] NAS and use their Photos software with an additional backup to both rsync.net and BackBlaze, in addition to using Google Photos — which I'll happily pay for. (humor my redundancy: I'm extra paranoid about losing memories of my mother.)

[0] https://www.synology.com

darau1
Why backblaze? /r/datahoarder also recommends them, but I couldn't find a reason.
risyachka
They are very reliable and have a very reasonable price which is hard to find these days.
bartvk
Plus, their consumer product is extremely easy to set up so I can recommend it to folks who aren’t computer experts.
sp332
They are cheap and they recently added an S3-like API, so lots of apps that let you point at an S3-bucket-like URL just work.
Nadya
Extremely reliable and one of the most "no muss, no fuss." backups. I had a drive fail and was able to recover all of my files by having them ship me a drive with my data on it and I returned the drive for basically no expense of my own (I have several 4-5TB drives and had an old 2TB drive fail. All for $5/mo to know that I don't have to worry about backup of cold-storage files for as long as they're in business.
arriu
I second this recommendation. I've done the whole DIY NAS thing a number of times but the Synology solution is just far more convenient and usually just works. Additionally, the there are so many other benefits to running a NAS, like the opportunity to plug in a set of IP cameras for security...

Also, the OP doesn't need to get rid of Google Photos. They can keep Google Photos as a off-site back-up.

ghjjjgv
Also there the Moments app by Synology that automatically backs up your photos to your NAS.

I third this recommendation.

I use the pointy clicky AWS Glacier backups app in case everything goes sideways.

possibleworlds
I’ll add a shoutout to the CloudSync app on Synology, which let’s you connect to most of the major cloud storage providers and sync up, down or bidirectionally. I use it back up (sync changes down only) my Dropbox, Google Drive, GCS and B2 folders. It’s especially handy for quick access to the > 1tb assets I have in Dropbox that I don’t have space to sync to my space limited computer HDs. Plus with Recycle Bin enabled on Synology shared folders you get ad hoc restoration of deleted files dating back as long as you want.
rubyist5eva
amazon prime gives you unlimited photos storage on top of all the other stuff that's included in prime
humanlion87
I feel it will only be a matter of time before they start charging though (just like how Google is doing). Right now they need all that data to maybe train their models or attract users?
rubyist5eva
I ended up going on a paid plan for storing other kinds of files (video mostly). You still get unlimited photos as long as you have your prime subscription, so it doesn’t count towards your quota on the paid side. I figure that’s their M.O. - lure you in with unlimited photos because it costs them next to nothing to store photos and then when they want to store other kinds of files it’s less friction to just get a paid plan. Seems to be the same strategy going with prime video because it is also included with prime but I have subscribed to a few channels on top of that so they get money from me that way.
mtlynch
If you're willing to self-host, Photoprism[0] is pretty nice and easy to get up and running.

It has the flavor of Google Photos, but it's definitely a step down in UX. One of the features I really love about Google Photos is the ability to jump quickly through time. Like if I'm looking for a photo I took around June 2018, I can get to it in <5 seconds.

I didn't realize what a magical feature it is until I tried looking for it with alternatives and found that they all have a lot of scrolling, pausing to load new photos, more scrolling.

But I'm impressed with what Photoprism has achieved as a small, donation-funded OSS project, so I'm hoping to see them grow.

[0] https://photoprism.app

jessedhillon
>Like if I'm looking for a photo I took around June 2018, I can get to it in <5 seconds.

Not only that, you can search for a photo of a light bulb you know you took, but don't know when, but simply typing "light bulb".

hanniabu
Do you know if they have a portable option so i can keep it on my external drive that i have all my media on?
durovo
Yes, I have it installed locally. Haven't played around with it much though, features like grouping by face were not present the last time I checked. Honestly, Google Photos is just too convenient. Photoprism is a good backup option though.
[deleted]
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crossroadsguy
Unless privacy is a concern (you were on Google photos so far) you might try Dropbox, Amazon, Flickr, One Drive etc. As for self-hosted, think real hard whether you want to be dealing with everything that comes with it.

If I had such a need and privacy was not an issue I would use Dropbox (I already use Dropbox a lot, easy to share, excellent download speeds, and I don't have a huge photo library).

No matter what you do, stay away from iCloud. By God, they have made it so bad that it feels like a criminal offence.

willio58
iCloud is great for a hands-off experience. But if you’re accessing photos professionally or even somewhat seriously, I totally agree.
crossroadsguy
iCloud sucks!

I tell you what I was trying to do just now. Literally minutes ago.

I have photos in "Library" (i.e. the first screen that loads) and I didn't want that. I wanted them in different albums and just stay there. So I added them to different albums. There's no way to "move". They will still show there.

Now you can hide them from "Library" and they will vanish from the Library. Awesome, right? Nope! They vanished from those other albums you had added them into as well. Now those photos are in a special library called "Hidden". Yes, all those photos!

Okay fine. Now you want them back in those albums. So you go to Hidden and select some photos to be added into an album. Everything happens fine it just that the photos still don't show anywhere but only in Hidden. So I guess you will have to first unhide those photos and get them all in Library and then add them all to albums.

And all I wanted was to keep the photos that processed (i.e. moved to diff albums) and the ones not processed separately.

Now I don't even want to start on how my friends exclaim "What kind of service is this? Which company? God such a pathetic download speed!". Those friends are from all over the globe.

twobitshifter
Sounds like albums are just tags, which is in general superior to folders.
rxbudian
btw, If you have office 365 subscription, Onedrive has 1TB space to use
berkut
It depends what you want and what you're willing to compromise on I think.

I ended up building my own, which has the advantages it's designed specifically for my needs (but which obviously means it's less likely to be useful for other people with different requirements or workflows).

My two main criteria were: supporting galleries of non-square images (very few solutions support this, they just crop to squares which makes things much easier for layout, but I don't like), and having portable catalogs with the metadata (mine are basically YAML defined metadata per photo, like geo location hierarchies (Europe / France / Paris), tags, categories, such that I am not locked to a DB, and can move the catalogs (and images) around on arbitrary drives / volumes, and can transfer them.

The large downside (although I'm willing to put up with it), is having to fairly manually curate each photo item, but a lot of "tourist photo" style stuff is quite similar for me, so I can share multiple metadata for multiple photos, so it's not too bad.

vishnumohandas
Hey, over the last year we've been building ente[1], an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos.

We have shipped open-source[2] web and mobile apps that have preserved 180,000+ files. Apart from cross-device sync, you can share your albums end-to-end encrypted, and filter photos by location and time.

We recently had a "successful" launch on r/degoogle[3]. We wanted to Show HN after incorporating the feedback we received from there, but since OP asked, I thought I’ll drop a comment here.

If you’ve any questions, please ask.

[1]: https://ente.io

[2]: https://github.com/ente-io

[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/njatok/we_built_a...

iamthepieman
180,000 photos seems tiny. I have about 20k photos just on my own, my wife probably has more. 180k is like 10-50 people. Not saying you can't handle it but 180k doesnt signal "I've got scaling all figured out" to me.
vishnumohandas
More than scale, it was trust and reliability that I wanted to show. Of these, I feel that scale is the simpler problem to solve.
0xdky
Especially with a stateless service like a photo hosting service, this is very true.

Wish you all the best!

jshmrsn
Everything has to start somewhere.
mavhc
I have 180,000 photos in Google Photos
raybb
What's your strategy to get enough users so that you become financially sustainable?
vishnumohandas
The current set of paid users are sufficient to break-even on the infrastructure costs.

As for personnel costs, a few more hundred paying users and we'll be set. Feedback from existing users have been positive, and we should be able to reach that point by end of the year.

It helps that we're living in one of the cheaper parts of the globe, and are not motivated by money. We're building this because an easy to use, privacy friendly alternative needs to exist.

sverhagen
> not motivated by money

Ummm, could you elaborate on this? It sounds great but it's at the same time so foreign to me...

speedgoose
I am not them but I know a lot of people who are not motivated by money. I guess they need and want enough money to happily live and work in good conditions, but not more, and they do not seek to become the next Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos.
orangepanda
Right. But you need money to pay for infrastructure and employees.

"not motivated by money" sounds very much like "we'll be shutting down in 2 years"

vishnumohandas
Hey, our infrastructure is already being paid for by existing users.

Our pricing plans are designed such that you cover your own storage + bandwidth costs, and then some more. We don’t have a "forever-free" plan, and don’t intend to have one.

And the compute requirements for a product like this are low (since most of the computation happens on the client).

So currently what we need money for is employees (engineers) and not infrastructure.

fire
"Not motivated by money" in this context simply means not being profit focused, so breaking even and/or revenue enough to hire some more engineers is probably the monetary goal
CharlesW
To me, that’s a red flag for a service I don’t want to see disappear in a few years.
binbag
Why? Not motivated by money still means they can generate income and even grow. They might not personally become rich, and they are ok with that. What's the problem?
whoisburbansky
“Not motivated by money” doesn’t mean they’re doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, it just means they’re optimizing for other things, and just see cash flow as a way to keep the lights on and their employees paid.
ludjer
Are there any plans to add search and automatic image tagging ?
vishnumohandas
Our web app[1] lets you search by time ("last week", "April 14", ...) and location ("New York").

Tagging faces and objects is on our roadmap, we will ship it.

[1]: https://web.ente.io

choward
I can't tell if this is self hosted or not. All I see is a centralized option. If not self hostable, a user still can't guarantee that this doesn't just end up being as bad as google photos. There are plenty of companies like this that provide an alternative to the mainstream then sell out. Really, the only person you can trust is yourself at the end of the day.
sp332
Down in the reddit comments it says it is not self-hosted because of limited "engineering bandwidth".
Aeolun
That seems counterintuitive.
vanous
As long as the server is closed source, this remains in the 'nice but do not touch' territory.
_fs
AKA we want to lock you in to our PAAS
egeozcan
It looks like they only open sourced the clients, not the backend.

Also the phrase "ente has an open architecture and source code that has been peer reviewed" that can be found on their website follows a dark pattern: hey, look we are open but not really.

vishnumohandas
Hey, I'm sorry that it came across that way. Thanks for pointing it out, I now see the lack of clarity. I've updated the copy to better reflect the situation.
egeozcan
Great, thanks for the fast reaction!
vishnumohandas
Hey, maintaining and providing support for a server that is de-coupled from underlying external integrations (storage, payment, secrets, email, ...) is what requires bandwidth.

Also, self-hosted consumer products are hard to sustain profitably. Avenues for monetization are low.

Given that our long term target audience is people like my parents, we did not see enough value in investing in a self-hosted variant, and wanted to reduce the number of distractions.

This is not to say that we are against the idea of a self-hosted variant, just that it is not a priority for us right now.

gtirloni
The self-hosted audience is also very small. I think you made the right choice.
TimPC
For photos I’d agree as most customers are end users. Don’t underestimate this for other products though. Self hosting is a huge feature for selling into large corporations with data security policies.
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anaganisk
Why would corporations want to use google photos alternative tho? They're probably are using Gsuite or Office 365 already, both of which have photo storage options. If they're okay with their emails there, I dont think photos is an issue. So yes they made the right choice, by ignore the self hosting crowd, which is a very small crowd.
vishnumohandas
Hey, ente is currently not directed at an audience that has the knowledge and energy to set up and maintain a reliable storage infrastructure.

We had started off as a self-hosted project, but ran into difficulties monetizing that model. We wanted to pay our rents, and continue working on this, and an E2EE SaaS was a way forward.

We are not averse to supporting a self-hosted version in the future. But that commitment requires engineering and support bandwidth, which we don’t have right now.

movedx
You've made the right choice not to opensource and or support self-hosting options from day one.

In my opinion open source software benefits greatly from first being closed sourced and commercially backed with an OSS release coming in the future after stability has been established.

nindalf
As a user of ente, I can say I’m pretty happy. It doesn’t have all the features that Google has but they’ve made a promising start. If the search feature becomes comparable, I’d move off Google photos permanently.
bgdam
Can the search feature of ente become comparable to Google Photos? AFAIK, ente does E2E encryption, which means that unless they index the EXIF data on each single device, and also run the image recognition algorithms on device, the search is never going to be comparable to Google Photos.
lazydud
I can't live without the face / object detection. It's been so useful
anaganisk
If they're extracting a the fingerprints what privacy are you expecting? A pinky promise that says, we won't read your data? That would long as long is its bought by Facebook/google. Remember pinky promises made by gazillion startups?
siddharthgoel88
Does this service encourages user outside EU?

What about latency concerns for people who are not based in EU? I saw on that website that the servers are hosted in EU, and say I need to use it in Asia will have service have usable latency?

vishnumohandas
Hey, some of our users (and us) are based out of Asia, and have not observed latency to be an issue. We are currently tunneling our data over Cloudflare, and that helps quite a bit.

If you find observable latency within the service, please write to vishnu[at]ente.io. I will see what we can do.

kingosticks
I got and email about this few weeks back (I must have signed up to the list at some point) but I was put off by two things.

> We've already preserved 100,000+ files, and are quite reliable at this point.

"quite reliable" doesn't cut it for a paid service for me, even a new one.

My second issue, and I might be wrong about this, is that there's no way to share photos with someone who isn't a (paying) ente user.

vishnumohandas
> "quite reliable"

As an engineer, I shy away from using superlatives. But sorry, I now understand that this could have been phrased better. Thank you for pointing it out.

> no way to share photos

Correction, the receiver can be on the free plan.

quaintdev
I am guessing he is expecting to share pics with users who did not sign up. It maybe a one time thing.

But I think you need user logged in because of encryption.

vishnumohandas
That’s right.

We could generate public URLs that contain the decryption key of the album within the URL fragment. But as an encrypted storage provider, we would like to ship this only after we're reasonably confident that there are checks in place to prevent abuse.

kingosticks
Yes, this is what I meant and the solution you describe is what I'd be looking for. So +1 from me!
spuz
ente looks interesting to me, but I would like to have the feature to share an album with anyone who has the link. I guess that is not so easy to do though as it would require creating a decrypted copy of the photos in the album that you wish to share which would take extra time and space.
vishnumohandas
The client that is sharing the album could append the decryption key of that album to the URL fragment, such that it never reaches the server.

For example: albums.ente.io/{albumID}/!#{decryptionKey}

Now on the receivers side, the client can use this `decryptionKey` to decrypt and render the photos.

StavrosK
I think this is a mismatch between UK English where "quite" means "extremely" and US English where "quite" means "mostly".
kingosticks
I'm British and to me "quite" here means "mostly" i.e. not entirely. Could well be a misunderstanding but it should be made clearer as this data is priceless.
StavrosK
Doesn't "quite good" mean "great"? That was my impression, at least.
taneq
This is classic British understatement. It doesn't literally mean 'great', but depending on how it's said it can be interpreted as such.
oneeyedpigeon
Not really, but it depends on context. The nuance is often difficult to detect when written. When spoken, a phrase like "quite extraordinary" or "quite brilliant" would usually be a superlative, as you suggest, but it would usually be indicated by emphasis on the "quite". And the adjective itself already has to be quite strong, so "quite good" will never really mean "great".
andybak
Another Brit. It's all in the context. "Quite" can easily be a strong superlative but it relies on shared understanding between the parties so I wouldn't depend on that interpretation.

It's fine in a spoken context as tone can add sufficient extra meaning. If you can guarantee the listener is expecting an informal register then it probably also comes across as a superlative. "I met him and he's quite unpleasant" would usually imply he was a total c*nt.

ghaff
>as this data is priceless

Personally, I'd never trust the only copy of something important to a service provider--especially one that isn't a "big name." (Though even in the case of big names there can be issues with account access, etc.)

ADDED: Curious why people find this a controversial statement. I understand if you have AWS set up with various redundancies but even a service like Backblaze I consider a belt and suspenders-type backup. This is in no way a commentary on the OP but simply an acknowledgement that stuff happens.

vishnumohandas
You're right about two being one and one being none.

Our current setup includes primary backups to BackBlaze[1], and eventually consistent replications to Scaleway's cold storage[2].

We would like to offer an extra replica as an addon in the future.

[1]: https://www.backblaze.com

[2]: https://www.scaleway.com/en/c14-cold-storage

ghaff
Makes sense. You can feel vulnerable in a big hurry if your primary fails or if it turns out that one of your backups wasn't being properly backed up to.

I know a lot of people these days are fine with their stuff mostly just being stored in "the cloud" someplace. But for things like photos, I really want a couple copies under my control to the degree possible.

KineticLensman
I think most Brits (I am a Brit) would write "very" when they mean "extremely" rather than "quite". In spoken English there is a lot of nuance, but if you said a meal was "quite good" it would often have a connotation of "better than just okay" rather than "excellent". Saying a meal was "really good" would be closer to "excellent".
WhyNotHugo
This looks pretty neat, I wonder how I've been missing it so far.

Do you have an public API? I'd love to have a tiny sync client to fetch photos and store them on my laptop.

vishnumohandas
The API is public, but the documentation needs work.

If your current use case is only to sync your uploaded files to a local folder, we have an Electron app that does just that: https://github.com/ente-io/bhari-frame/releases/tag/v1.0.3

WhyNotHugo
Thanks! Any reference to the API, even if it's just incomplete docs?

An electron app seems like a huge overkill for something so simple (have you considered just a simple cli instead?).

vishnumohandas
The API doc is incomplete and outdated, and I'm embarrassed to share it in its current state. I will update this thread once it is presentable.

The Electron app is indeed an over kill (hence the repo-name "bhari", meaning overweight). But it made it easy for us to reuse stable code that performed authentication, decryption, data-sync, etc. Also, we did not want to commit to the overhead of maintaining another stack (say a CLI or a native app) at a point where the value it would provide to a customer was unclear.

tealpod
Product looks simple and promising as a good alternative to google photos.

Feedback: You can improve your website looks.

Goodluck

vishnumohandas
Thank you!

Regarding the website, I would be grateful if you could point out the worst part(s). I would love to improve.

rubyfan
What is the design target for this service? Is it the technophile who is trying to degoogle, is it some other specific design target or perhaps more general audience?

If it’s degooglers then perhaps convincing us it has everything Google Photos had is job number 1. If it’s missing feature X then you’ve got a reason to say no, if it’s at parity then it comes down to whether we trust YOU and is the deal good enough.

You’ve already convinced us you’re not Google so there is some things implied but you need to lean into it. Privacy, not having you information used for ad targeting, never sharing our photos or information derived with third parties - those are all thing to highlight (be the anti-Google).

I think you need some other killer feature or appeal that makes you different than iCloud here since Apple are already the anti-Google. I think you can also get 2TB of iCloud Photo storage for $10 a month so you gotta hit that if you want to charge $15 for 500GB.

jasim
Kudos to the name! The meaning ("ente" = "mine" in Malayalam) meshes deeply with what the service is, and it is short and easy for everyone to pronounce.
llampx
It means duck in German.
Solocomplex
Why is every string in all lowercase? It reminds me of tumblr..
vishnumohandas
We thought it looked playful, friendly that way, and less like a boring archival-solution. We liked that persona.
dbmnt
> We have shipped open-source[2] web and mobile apps that have preserved 180,000+ files.

Is that the total number of files on your platform? Not to be rude, but is this supposed to be impressive or reassuring? My photo collection is approaching half that number, and I'm just one person, so now I'm feeling completely underwhelmed by the claim.

vishnumohandas
I felt that having replicated 200k files without failures is an indicator of reliability (not scale).

But you're right, the number is minuscule compared to where we are hoping to be. We're just getting started and I'm hopeful that we will 10x this number in the next few months.

sircastor
If you have a Synology storage device, you can run Moments on it, which has a lot of Photos’ basic feature set. It’s imperfect, but I’ve liked it because I have wholesale control over my photos.
mithusingh32
If you're interested in a self hosted cloud, take a look at nextcloud.

https://nextcloud.com/

I've been using for a couple months and been extremely happy with it.

samename
Do you manage your own server or do you host it somewhere like AWS/Digital Ocean?
galbar
I do, on Digital Ocean.

I'm using DO's Spaces (S3) as file storage. I also suspect very strongly that it is the main source of the slowness of the nextcloud (but it is super cheap!).

The main pain in the ass is having to update every year or so. It usually works flawlessly, until it doesn't and I have to run a few manual commands. Other than that, it just works. 100% recommend it.

Mine is a personal instance, being used by 5 people (family). I've had the nextcloud and its postgres database running in a 5$ instance for years, no problem (I did add a bit of swap for the DB).

aborsy
I suppose at 5$/month, your instance has 1GB RAM.

I should warn users that such instance may struggle to run even bare minimum nextcloud.

2-4GB is preferred.

galbar
True. The Nextcloud docs suggest at least 2GB of RAM.

On the other hand, mine is running at 400MB right now.

I guess it also depends on the frequency and how it is used. We mostly use the apps on the phone and file app integrations (Ubuntu lets you access the files from the Files app).

It is true that it is somewhat slow when loading the website.

papul1993
How do you handle routine backups of the machine that you host nextcloud on?
ohthehugemanate
I run nextcloud on my home NAS with 8TB of data. I use https://github.com/gilbertchen/duplicacy for backups to azure blob. Strong recommendation from me, I tried so many backup solutions... including Borg, duplicity, rsync, and I don't even remember the rest anymore. Duplicacy's no database solution and support for a zillion destination options really got me.
ohthehugemanate
I love my nextcloud... but I hate its photos experience. I know there are a lot of third party photo apps that work with WebDAV, but I haven't really explored them yet. What do you use?
leetrout
https://www.smugmug.com/ and https://www.flickr.com/ (Same parent company now).

Chris MacAskill founded it with his son. Pretty solid company, seems like.

https://mixergy.com/interviews/smugmug-chris-macaskill-inter...

ghaff
Yeah. I don't use the community aspect of flickr much these days but seems a pretty solid place to upload photos and share them.
vzaliva
I would never use or recommend Flickr. They lied to me. As premium user (for many yars) the promise to me was that photos uploaded will be kept free forever as long as the service exists. Even if I stop paying. Then they went back on that. They may have a very good reasons, but the trust was broken.
sp332
They were owned by Yahoo for a while. Has the management changed since the one that broke your trust?
jablan
Why would anyone need to care who sits in the management? The trust was broken by a company.
sp332
A company is run by people. It's not like the logo decided to screw users over.
vzaliva
Since the new management never offered to restore my trust by going back on the original promise, they are complicit.
techrat
Flickr hasn't been under the same ownership twice over now.
justusthane
I've been a paying customer of SmugMug for years and highly recommend them. I use it as a photography portfolio though, not as a Google Photos replacement (although it certainly can be used that was as well).
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pjs_
Not even remotely an alternative in terms of usability/reliability, but I can describe my DIY setup.

I have a DIY NAS, based on a Raspberry Pi and an external hard disk enclosure, running in my kitchen. The disks are encrypted with LUKS. A combination of Syncthing and a cron job ensure that photos from my phone are constantly synced to the NAS without any input from me, and old photos are removed from my phone. A nice bonus is that if someone were to search my phone, they would not find many photos on it. I also never run out of space for photos/videos on my phone.

To view photos I use Shotwell. It does a decent if not perfect job of tagging, basic editing etc.

For encrypted, deduplicated offsite backups I use rsync.net and Borg, again together with a cron job.

All this crap is configured with Ansible in an effort to make it a little less fragile and more reproducible. It has been running without maintenance for a year or so but if you take this path, expect to spend many, many hours tearing your hair out over SAMBA Unix permissions and all sorts of other delights...

hiisukun
I have a similar setup, but with the Shotwell part replaced by Lychee. It's a self-hostable photo browsing web app. I can share photos with family members that way, like how I might share a google photo album to them.
cyberge99
Second for Lychee. If self-hosting, I would also recommend Piwigo. It has a nice complementary phone app.
MeinBlutIstBlau
I'm interested in your rassberry pi nas. Can it be done with a pi0? I've got one laying around and would love to put it to good use. I'm familiar with syncthing so it doesn't sound too much trouble for me right now.
scambier
not OP, but I tried to setup a NAS with my older B+, and it was really unreliable. The disk went to sleep every few minutes even when there was a file being read/written.
MeinBlutIstBlau
Dang. My journey for a practical use of my pi 0 continues...
qq4
Fwiw, I don't remember having drive problems when I used a pi zero as a small NAS. I do remember configuring the drives to never idle and spin down, though. I think I used hdparm and I definitely had a power supply that could support the drives.
pjs_
I would expect that a pi0 could do it - depends on what sort of performance you want. An of course for a NAS you are better off with an Ethernet port - I would recommend a full-size SBC for this reason. But no fundamental reason why a pi0 can't do it. Here's a nice example: https://hackaday.io/project/8688-raspberry-pi-zero-altoid-na...
sva_
I'm doing pretty much the same thing with an rpi/syncthing. It's simple enough and "just works", while maintaining full ownership of my photos/videos. I looked into Shotwell and it seems pretty nice. I haven't really used anything to organize my Photos so far. One might say it's well worth a shot (sorry.)
qq4
I have always made a separate user with no login for network shares, be it syncthing or samba and never ran into permission problems. The samba config is pretty friendly with permission options. If anyone has ran into problems I might be able to help.
RotaryTelephone
Moved all content to Synology. Then tried Photos and Moments but eventually settled on Photoprism for open source, ease of use, features and UI.
ping_pong
To be honest, $2/month isn't that unreasonable from a useful service. I would definitely class Google Photos as useful, especially its ability to search for pictures.

I personally use iCloud, and back everything to a Synology.

chomp
It is not, however for some of us, there was an implicit “I let you datamine my images, you host them” relationship. Having to pay google tips the scales, so why not spend your $2 on a more privacy oriented service?
stevage
Because most competitors are much more than $2/mo.
weird-eye-issue
I love being able to search random things like "Honda" or "waffles" to find pictures from years ago in a few seconds. I use it often now that I can do it
smolyeet
Because the people willing to pay Google for their service don't mind the use of their pictures to better their services elsewhere. Google didn't get to be where it was without us , and the fight for privacy isn't worth it for some (most) people. Alternatives usually involve self hosting, trusting a privacy focused service , or not doing it at all. It's tiring. I respect the effort , but In a lot of ways it feels like going backwards.
Superblazer
The fight for privacy is absolutely worth it. Those people have no idea about what they are getting into, they don't know anything. That is not something to base upon.
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kevml
To assume that they don’t know “what they are getting into” is a bit patriarchal.
Superblazer
You think a random person who would never look or care about tech would understand the privacy issues? Absolutely not. All they'd know is what the companies say and advertise.
kayoone
I don't agree, especially due to massive media coverage around these issues even my mom who knows nothing about tech is very hesitant to sign up with new services and existing ones changing policies and what not. Not everyone understands the privacy issues deeply, but they are at least aware and in many cases more careful than say 5 years ago.
taauji
That is exactly how google wanted it to be. Thy lied made everyone attached to the technology and now milking off it. Moreover I would not like google to invade my privacy if I am paying for it. I am paying and also my privacy is being breached. that doesn't seem fair
Jabbles
What kind of datamining? I suppose we have no way of actually knowing if it's true, but Google does say they don't use Photos data for ads:

As always, we don’t sell your information to anyone, and we don’t use information in apps where you primarily store personal content—such as Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Photos—for advertising purposes, period.

https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/keeping-priva...

dolmen
> As always, we don’t sell your information to anyone, and we don’t use information in apps where you primarily store personal content—such as Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Photos—for advertising purposes, period.

As always with privacy policies, the information is in what is NOT said.

1. They don't sell to anyone. But what giving away for free?

2. They don't use personal content for advertising purposes. But what about other purposes than advertising? For example applying face or location recognition in photos to establish a profile that is used in a fraud detection service in Google Pay?

Jabbles
1 seems unlikely to me - why would Google do that? It would always be in exchange for something, which is pretty much selling.

2 seems more plausible.

croon
1) I trust them when they say they don't sell it, technically.

However they probably do sell information/meta data they themselves have mined from my data, which they probably claim is harmless and de-personalized.

beagle3
FB effectively gave data away to app developers (e.g. Cambridge analytica).

They got something in return - as they do with all their partners - but this is not generally considered a sale, and often not even a trade.

alisonkisk
Users gave data away to app developers, not Facebook.
snowwrestler
Google, in general, does not sell or give away data. What they do is charge advertisers to target ads to users based on that data.

The distinction is that 3rd parties only have access to Google UIs or APIs based around ad targeting selectors. There is no API for 3rd parties to just download raw user data from Google.

This is in contrast to Facebook, which used to allow “apps” on their platform to suck down raw user profile data in large quantities.

It seems very likely that Google is using their user data for non-ad purposes, for example using Google Photos data to train ML image recognition engines, or using Gmail data to train conversational AI systems.

patrickaljord
At $2 per month they are probably still subsidizing you with datamining.
fomine3
I'm fine my photos are managed by Google, so I signed up 100GB plan of Google One. Google Opinion Rewards provides me enough money to fulfill the annual fee.
spamalot159
How are you getting so many surveys? I can't seem to get more than one every few months!
fomine3
I'm in Japan. I sometimes (about 30%) receive survey about payment method after I visit random store in a day. It uses my location history. Rewards are about 10-50JPY (about 9-45c) each.
pindab0ter
What’s your setup for that? How do you sync (incoming) photos to an arbitrary place outside of the Photos library?
lordnacho
I'm not the GP but what I do is all my camera devices will sync to a cloud drive, and my NAS then syncs the cloud drive. Google Photos seems to be able to see them. That way I always have two copies of the image, a cloud version and a local.

The main failure mode I'm concerned about is if Google decides I'm no longer worthy of an account. In that case I'll still have my pics and I'll put in the effort to set up some other service.

peterbraden
How do you do this with iPhoto?

With an iPhone it doesn't seem that there is a way to sync with a folder anymore.

lordnacho
I'm unsure how to do it with iPhoto. My guess is it syncs up to Apple cloud, from which the NAS should be able to sync? At least once it's off the phone you don't have the sandbox, which is a bit stronger on Apple devices, IIRC.

My cameras are all Androids, so I use FolderSync to put things in the cloud. It being Android there's still a filesystem that it can scan. I use an app on my QNAP to bring them back home.

plank_time
Synology has an iPhone app called DS Photo you can use to download pics directly to your NAS.
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funkaster
I have a local nas running zfs and owncloud. I backup my photos to owncloud and while not the same ui/ux, it’s pretty good to share with things with the family.
yumraj
Amazon Photos? They have free storage for photos, I think there still do, if you’re a prime member at least in the US.