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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

#241

Post by Z_I_F_F »

the_biot wrote: post #224
missedthecue wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The other day I sent out a link made with Google Photos' "create link" function. That's not a share to another user, just a link that anyone can open, no Google account required. But one person showed me that hitting that link on her phone, Google wanted to authenticate her before showing the picture. That is utterly unacceptable.

Genuinely curious - could you elaborate on why that is so unacceptable? What does requiring authentication imply, or lead to in the future?

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

#243

Post by criddell »

mattrighetti wrote: post #102

In my opinion, people who don’t trust google (like myself) would not trust every other company too. The perfect solution for me would be something that I can self host on my LAN with a clean and intuitive app like the google photos one, that would be a service that I would pay for.

With an Electron client, you also have to trust all the JavaScript libraries that NPM brings in (and this can be a huge number).

Electron is pretty cool, but it doesn’t seem compatible with anything related to security or encryption.

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

#244

Post by pratnala »

Radim wrote: post #166
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…

> We realized soon that it's hard to monetize such [self-hosted product] Spot on. We iterated on a similar product in this space: "privacy preserving", "self-hosted", "open source" etc. But focused on local AI indexing & search of personal videos and photos [0], rather than backups. We ultimately shelved VideoNinja because we weren't able to find a sustainable business angle: * Non-technical people simply don't care…

I think too many technical people have too much of a distrust of the cloud. I, for one, am happy to offload as much as possible to the cloud (except latency-sensitive things like games) and not carry around drives and drives at home.

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

#245

Post by joshmn »

vishnumohandas wrote: post #219
joshmn wrote: post #214

Super cool. Did you roll your own storage solution or are you using one of the many cloud providers? If the latter, which one? I ask because I've done a ton of work in optimizing costs in this area (at large scales), and as the top comment mentioned, $15 is kind of steep for 1TB.

Hey, we're currently using two S3 compliant storage providers (Backblaze and Scaleway). I would love to talk more about how we could reduce our pricing. Please let me know if I can reach out to you over the email mentioned on your HN profile. Thanks!

More than welcome to!

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

#246

Post by iknowstuff »

I tried it, but unfortunately the complete lack of auto-categorization in all of those e2ee photo storage apps renders them unusable for anyone with a large library. Ente is not the first one to do this, there are many others with similarly lacking UX, like MEGA.

Both Apple Photos and Google Photos:

1. have easy search by location on a map of the world.

2. allow browsing to any date in an instant.

3. index photos by objects/faces and allow for instant searching - Apple even does it on-device.

Also, frankly, I don't trust you to stay around for long, so I would appreciate the option to store encrypted photos on a cloud of my choosing that I already pay for, with a separate subscription for using your app. Not sure what the Venn diagram of , , looks like.

Looking forward to an app which works for people with large libraries. :)

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

#247

Post by vishnumohandas »

nicoburns wrote: post #233
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…

Can I suggest adding pricing tier(s) between 100GB and 1000GB? I have between 100gb and 200gb of photos, and £14.99/month seems like a lot considering I only pay £2.49/month for google storage. I'd definitely consider paying a premium for this service, but not 6x.

Drawing a direct parallel with Google will make this difficult, since they own their storage and network infrastructure and have ways to monetize your data. But here's an explanation on why there are large gaps between plans:

- Our 1TB plan costs only 3x the 100GB plan. This model works under the assumption that the average utilization of a 1TB plan (across all customers) will be ~30%.

- If we were to bring in an intermediary plan (say 500GB), we would have to increase the pricing of the 1TB plan (since at least 50% will now be utilized), and also set the price of the 500GB plan to at least 2x of the 100GB plan. Both plans now appear unattractive.

- Since Apple and Google don't support per GB billing yet (which IMO would have been the fairest way to go), we had to pick buckets, and the current ones seemed like the fairest possible.

I hope this makes sense.

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

#248

Post by roothog »

smallerfish wrote: post #158
sillysaurusx wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> 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.)

It's amusing how people's insights can turn myopic. Search in photos is the killer feature, and it even solves the problem that you have.

If you realize that you need to see photos from January 2015, don't try to scroll back in your photos feed. Just do a second search for "January 2015".

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

#250

Post by vishnumohandas »

diebeforei485 wrote: post #238

I'm curious what challenges you've faced on iOS -- for example, has Apple made it difficult to implement background sync?

We are still facing challenges with the reliability of background syncs on iOS. There is a threat of the OS blocking our background tasks altogether and we end up having to be very conservative when it comes to uploading data in the background. Which a lot of times results in 0 files getting synced until the app is in the foreground. These constraints don't seem to apply to Apple Photos though.
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