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Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

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Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#131

Post by vishnumohandas »

choward wrote: post #83
vishnumohandas wrote: post #27

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 feedbac…

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.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#133

Post by vishnumohandas »

orangepanda wrote: post #123
speedgoose wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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"

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.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#134

Post by tompagenet2 »

mceachen wrote: post #99
Aeolun wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh. Deduplication across all drives! Consider me interested. Will try this out later.

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…

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.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#135

Post by mceachen »

Tempest1981 wrote: post #119
mceachen wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How do you compute the duplicates? Does it detect rotated dupes, and resolution differences? I tried a few things with ImageMagick, but ran into problems. I'll have to try your app!

Details are here: https://photostructure.com/faq/what-do-you-mean-by-dedupe/

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#136

Post by vishnumohandas »

siddharthgoel88 wrote: post #125
vishnumohandas wrote: post #27

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 feedbac…

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?

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.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#138

Post by [deleted] »

Superblazer wrote: post #84
smolyeet wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lik…

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.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#139

Post by bartvk »

risyachka wrote: post #37
darau1 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why backblaze? /r/datahoarder also recommends them, but I couldn't find a reason.

They are very reliable and have a very reasonable price which is hard to find these days.

Plus, their consumer product is extremely easy to set up so I can recommend it to folks who aren’t computer experts.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Photos?

#140

Post by possibleworlds »

ghjjjgv wrote: post #70
arriu wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.
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