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Show HN: We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos

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Re: Show HN: We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos

#141

Post by domh »

arendtio wrote: post #72

From what I have seen, I like Photoprism [1] better. Yes, they are a different kind of product, but feature wise they should be considered a competitor. Yes, ente.io is easier to setup, but there are many things lacking or unpolished (e.g. the image sizes that are being loaded while going through the fotos fullscreen in the browser). [1] https://photoprism.app

I just set up PhotoPrism myself this week! With it being completely self-hosted, this isn't something I'd be comfortable asking someone non-technical to do.

I like that it is self hosted, it also uses TensorFlow to classify images so you can perform keyword searches e.g "museum". It doesnt appear to be as good as Google Photos though, e.g in GP you can search "vaccination card" and it does what you expect which is very impressive.

Face detection is currently under heavy development also, which is very exciting: https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism/issues/22

There are certainly things that are missing, but I'm okay with the tradeoffs for now in the hope that it will eventually improve.

Re: Show HN: We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos

#142

Post by mackrevinack »

pininja wrote: post #122
chias wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The software with these features is called Synology Moments. I use it and I mostly love it, at the very least as a backup for my Google Photos. My experience is that it works great, provided that you're on your local network. When away from home or traveling, less so. Maybe I could configure things better to alleviate that, I don't know, but I haven't managed to yet. Sharing is less convenient. Trying to share a phot…

For at-home NAS, is Synology the best for recreating Google services?

i have one myself and i would say its the best out of all the alternative nas's out there. you pay a bit extra but its worth it considering how easy it is to setup. i also paid a bit more extra for the plus model so i could run docker which in turns gives you a huge selection of other apps over the built in apps or the synocommunity apps

https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

Re: Show HN: We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos

#143

Post by dane-pgp »

user-the-name wrote: post #59
YPPH wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The source code of the client-side apps appears to be available on GitHub. So if they're bluffing, it won't be too long until someone calls them out on it.

Unless they only send compromised code to you personally and nobody else.

One way to mitigate that is through Binary Transparency, which would allow people to detect if a release is made for which there is no source code available (assuming the project already has reproducible builds). There is already a project attempting this for Arch Linux packages[0].

Of course it's still possible that an update could be sent to everyone which contains some code that only runs when a certain username is entered, so users would need to avoid updating the app until an audit by a trusted third party had approved it.

[0] https://github.com/kpcyrd/pacman-bintrans

Re: Show HN: We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos

#144

Post by TingPing »

arendtio wrote: post #72

From what I have seen, I like Photoprism [1] better. Yes, they are a different kind of product, but feature wise they should be considered a competitor. Yes, ente.io is easier to setup, but there are many things lacking or unpolished (e.g. the image sizes that are being loaded while going through the fotos fullscreen in the browser). [1] https://photoprism.app

That service doesn't look like it's encrypted and not really equal then.

Re: Show HN: We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos

#145

Post by DenisM »

barbazoo wrote: post #139

Please please support custom storage back ends, I'd love to use my Dropbox or S3 or whatever to still fully own my pictures. And I'd love to pay extra to opt out of and analysis, tagging, etc of my photos. Basically I'd like the interface to be similar to Google Photos but with a privacy focused storage engine and clients.

I concur. However storage is how they plan to make money, so there will need to be a different monetization strategy for BYO storage. As yet I can't imagine any.

EDIT:

I think have an idea! Add the S3/OneDrive/Etc support but comment it out. To make use of it one would have to download the source, XCode, compile it, and deploy it. This puts a cap on the number of people who can do that, so you won't end up with everyone getting a free copy. Those people who are able to do it are likely to be asked for advice by their less techy friend, so this is basically free software to key influencers.... Ok, so this does not sound as exciting as it did before I started typing, but maybe this will lead to something...

Re: Show HN: We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos

#147

Post by samstave »

How ripe is this space?

Recall Origami which stated to do same and then they got a qui-killed before they could even launch?

I haven't used any online photo storage place for years because I dont trust them, but that's also a lame excuse because I have yet to be able to extricate Google from my life, which is a smoldering desire in the back of my head..

But I feel like any of these photo upstarts are going to be short lived.

I'd be happy to pay $60 for the app, and then pay some fee/month for storage space, dedupe etc...

What might be cool for an organization option would be a shared library of assets such that dev's and artists can manage a library of digital assets across teams and projects and integrate with ssomethingnlike slack..

Re: Show HN: We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos

#148

Post by missedthecue »

imagine99 wrote: post #77
Youden wrote: post #46

The monthly storage costs are too high. For the price of 1TB from you (15€), I can buy more than 2 TB just about anywhere else. Commercially, Apple and Google are both 2TB for 10 CHF and Amazon gives you unlimited as part of a Prime membership. Storage providers like Backblaze and Wasabi both charge around $5/TB and that's really the table-stakes price. For the more DIY-inclined, Hetzner sells a 2TB OwnCloud instance…

I fully agree. It's a hard sell getting people to switch from an evil but known cloud provider to an unknown cloud provider that claims to not be evil. What we do not need is more cloud offerings that can change, vanish or lock us out at the blink of an algorithm's eye. What we need, rather, are reliable and easy-to-use solutions that allow us to retain full control of our data (i.e. self-hosted and offline) while ha…

What about Google photos is evil? I don't get it.

Re: Show HN: We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos

#149

Post by vishnumohandas »

rock_hard wrote: post #124
vishnumohandas wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you have a thumbnail of every photo client side In the happy path the files/thumbnails are indexed before they are uploaded. But we are designing a framework that will pull files/thumbnails for indexing if they are unindexed or indexed by older models. > how do you do this in a privacy preserving way Our accuracy will not match that offered by services who index your data on their servers. But there's a trade of…

As someone who has worked on systems like these let me translate: “You stuff will be private but in return accuracy will be so bad that the UX is gonna suck!” That’s the key piece people miss when they wanna do anything with ML…that’s it’s a different problem compared to writing code because it’s not about the code anymore, it’s about having great training data!

Apple Photos seems to be using just Core ML[1] for on-device recognition and it does a pretty good job. As for Android, we plan to use tflite, but the accuracy is yet to be measured. And if customers do install our desktop app, we will be able to improve the indexes by re-indexing data with the extra bit of compute available.

We don't feel that the entire UX of a photo storage app will "suck" because of a reduced accuracy in search results, and we think that for some of us the reduced accuracy might not be a deal breaker.

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coreml

Re: Show HN: We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos

#150

Post by woofie11 »

Youden wrote: post #46

The monthly storage costs are too high. For the price of 1TB from you (15€), I can buy more than 2 TB just about anywhere else. Commercially, Apple and Google are both 2TB for 10 CHF and Amazon gives you unlimited as part of a Prime membership. Storage providers like Backblaze and Wasabi both charge around $5/TB and that's really the table-stakes price. For the more DIY-inclined, Hetzner sells a 2TB OwnCloud instance…

I can pay for a terabyte of Amazon Glacier for $50/year. Amazon Deep Glacier is $12 per month.

$300/year for 2TB isn't happening. I can buy a 12TB HDD for less, if I shop around.

I'd like a service like this to keep small, well-compressed 1080p or 4k photos available for instant access, and original files in archival storage of some kind.

I'm totally glad to pay the $10/year for the baseline service, and another $12 for deep glacier costs. I'm not glad to pay thousands of dollars for a service like this over the lifetime of my photos. I'm not quite sure where the line between that is.

I'll also mention: open-source, data export, and the option of self-hosting is helpful. I don't want to spin up an EC2 instance for this when I can buy $12, but if you go out-of-business, I'd like to have the option. Could also be an option you only guarantee if the service is discontinued or has substantially different costs/terms.

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