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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#151

Post by smolyeet »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #103
benbristow wrote: post #23

Your homepage says "protect your photos/faces etc. from algorithms" The algorithms are what makes Google Photos; Google Photos. If I wanted to just store my photos I'd throw them in a S3 bucket or Dropbox or something. Google Photos lets me automatically categorise my photos by person, lets me search my library using text search for anything (e.g. I can search 'museum' and see pictures I've taken in museums). That is…

Am I the only one who never realized you can search "museum" and see your museum photos? Now that you've mentioned it, yes, I'd like to try that. But as a counterpoint to your argument, I've never needed it, and I suspect that a lot of people may not actually be getting the same value propositions that you're getting. On the other hand, Google Photos is Google Photos. But it's often a mistake to compete directly with…

There's more you can do honestly. Search and and assign people so you can find picture with just them. This also works for pets. People, pets , objects, place, etc. Hell, I searched the car I use to drift and it showed up. It's really neat.

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

#152

Post by DenisM »

Question: Why XChaCha20? If you used aes256 I wouldn't even give it a thought and simply move on to the next question, but now I have stop and ask what's going on and wonder if you did it right. Just seems like unnecessary friction in my decision process.

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

#153

Post by robertlagrant »

Youden wrote: post #106
vishnumohandas wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, so the project had initially started off as a self-hostable software (with an option to buy a pre-configured device). We realized soon that it's hard to monetize such a product in the consumer space to the point where it can become self-sustaining. We don't have a problem with offering a self-hosted variant. But given our limited engineering bandwidth we had to take a call on who our target market should be, and…

I get the decision but I think it misses part of the problem: how do you convince people like your mum and dad to start paying for backups and how do you convince them to pay extra for privacy? I suspect the way it usually happens is that somebody your parents trust (like you) tells them to sign up for a privacy-preserving backup service. But who's going to tell them to do that? Do you have the money to pay for adver…

I think that's a bit apocalyptic. Plenty of time to observe and adjust.

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

#154

Post by vishnumohandas »

ant6n wrote: post #136

Very interested in this. She questions: How does one migrate to this from Google photos? How does one share across the family? Is it possible to have a local backup (e.g. on my desktop) in case something goes wrong? What are plans for features beyond just storing photos (categorizing, tagging, labelling, albums, comments/notes, geotags, stories, etc.)? What's the pricing?

> How does one migrate to this from Google photos?

You can export your data from takeout.google.com, and drag and drop the output folder into web.ente.io.

> How does one share across the family?

Currently we don't have family plans yet. Existing customers are sharing the same account with their partners. This is on our roadmap and we will ship it soon.

> Is it possible to have a local backup?

Our desktop app[1] has an option to sync your uploaded data to a local disk drive.

> categorizing, tagging, labelling, albums, comments/notes, geotags, stories.

We already have albums and stories. All the other features you mentioned apart from "comments/notes" were already on our roadmap. I've just added "comments/notes" too to it[2].

> What's the pricing?

https://ente.io/#pricing

[1]: https://github.com/ente-io/bhari-frame/releases/latest

[2]: https://roadmap.ente.io/ability-to-add-commentsnotes-to-a-ph...

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

#155

Post by chrisseaton »

Aspos wrote: post #50
benbristow wrote: post #23

Your homepage says "protect your photos/faces etc. from algorithms" The algorithms are what makes Google Photos; Google Photos. If I wanted to just store my photos I'd throw them in a S3 bucket or Dropbox or something. Google Photos lets me automatically categorise my photos by person, lets me search my library using text search for anything (e.g. I can search 'museum' and see pictures I've taken in museums). That is…

Those "algorithms" can run locally, on a NAS or a desktop, generate the metadata and make it available to you only on your mobile. I can see myself paying for such software if it was mature enough.

> Those "algorithms" can run locally

But I don't want my GPU burning away running them when they could run much more efficiently and out of mind in the cloud.

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

#156

Post by vishnumohandas »

caffeine wrote: post #117

What’s your story for exporting from Google photos? I would happily use this service if it could automatically backup my Google Photos to protect me against the possibility of Google killing my accounts.

You can take out your Photos data from takeout.google.com, and drag and drop the output folder into https://web.ente.io.

We understand and parse the metadata files Google generates and support resumable uploads.

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

#158

Post by smallerfish »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #103
benbristow wrote: post #23

Your homepage says "protect your photos/faces etc. from algorithms" The algorithms are what makes Google Photos; Google Photos. If I wanted to just store my photos I'd throw them in a S3 bucket or Dropbox or something. Google Photos lets me automatically categorise my photos by person, lets me search my library using text search for anything (e.g. I can search 'museum' and see pictures I've taken in museums). That is…

Am I the only one who never realized you can search "museum" and see your museum photos? Now that you've mentioned it, yes, I'd like to try that. But as a counterpoint to your argument, I've never needed it, and I suspect that a lot of people may not actually be getting the same value propositions that you're getting. On the other hand, Google Photos is Google Photos. But it's often a mistake to compete directly with…

I use it all the time - it's the killer feature of google photos. The premise is that if you come back from vacation with 300 photos, it's unlikely that you (the average non photography-nerd user) are going to sit there and tag them all. If in a few years you want to find "that photo of me you took on the beach in north carolina", with a quick search you can.

There are annoying limitations though, probably because the original team moved on and it's in maintenance stage. Using my example above, google photos has no idea what the "outer banks" are (which is where the beach photos were taken in north carolina) and returns no results. It also has trouble parsing out entities from search terms, so "north carolina beach maggie" isn't going to find pictures of Maggie on the beach in North Carolina (which you'd think they could really fix given that, well, they're google). Finally, there's no way (that I know of) to jump from search results to your full timeline; let's say that "north carolina beach" gets me a bunch of beach pictures from January 2015 (yeah, it was cold), but doesn't have _the_ picture from the trip that I know I want - there's no direct way to click to January 2015 from the results, which really sucks. (Instead you have to go back out of results and use their fiddly scroll to get there.)

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

#159

Post by gpm »

chrisseaton wrote: post #155
Aspos wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those "algorithms" can run locally, on a NAS or a desktop, generate the metadata and make it available to you only on your mobile. I can see myself paying for such software if it was mature enough.

> Those "algorithms" can run locally But I don't want my GPU burning away running them when they could run much more efficiently and out of mind in the cloud.

Then you aren't the target audience?
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