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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

#381

Post by sillysaurusx »

Jcowell wrote: post #266
sillysaurusx wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I like apple / iCloud / my iPhone, I do like the idea of seeing all the places on a map that I’ve traveled with my lovely wife Emily. We’re hoping to go to the Seychelles if the next three months work out at my contract gig. I like the idea of being able to type “water” and see a bunch of water bottles mixed in with all the water-y places we’ve visited. What sealed the deal was to see it on a map. I typed…

Yes but I’m saying that’s a feature in Photos right now. So long as the photo has location data , you can see it on the Map in Places on the albums tab.

Thank you! I did finally figure out what you were pointing out. Apparently there is a “places” album, as you say.

For some reason, it only has 40 places, whereas I have 9,987 photos. I definitely have photos from Cancun, so I wonder if the location data somehow got stripped, possibly when I got a new iPhone around 4 months ago… though that doesn’t make much sense to me.

Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks for pointing out that the thing I wanted already exists on iOS, even if it didn’t have a pin on Cancun. I’ll check the exif data someday, perhaps, or sync to Google photos and see if it pops up.

Cheers!

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

#382

Post by ludjer »

istingray wrote: post #304
Spooky23 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that you are overestimating the size of the audience of people who have nerd rage over whatever we’re pissed off at Apple about or have meaningful concerns about government surveillance. They’d be better off focusing on making a better user experience instead of E2EE drama.

The size of the audience may be small indeed. But Apple users on average have deep pockets and are willing to spend. A quick search suggests Apple users spend >2x what Android users spend. No data yet on what Apple users spend compared to Linux users. It's part of the reason "but 5% marketshare!" was never a good argument against the rise of Mac/iPhone.

The moms and kids dropping 1000$ on candy crush every month are not going to switch off apple. The big spenders in apples echo system are not the tech literate. The tech literate normally cost way more to maintained from a client perspective. Also they are allot more concerned over costs with regards to space as seen by allot of comments on this page talking about how expensive storage is.

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

#383

Post by icemelt8 »

noduerme wrote: post #302
Roritharr wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the same boat, have been watching, love that they have a businessmodel and am waiting for the time when they are covering my needs (face recognition, object / scene detection...). I'd even pay a 2$/month "lurker" subscription which has like 100mb of storage so I can check the features from time to time and support the team.

As someone who's never used cloud-based photo browsers... I always assumed the facial recognition aspect was primarily for social media apps that try to tag known faces from a user's friends group, to put it in those people's news feeds or something. It's one reason I avoid being photographed and ask people not to tag my name to my face if they do post a photo I'm in. I'm wondering, what's the utility of facial recog…

I use Google Photos extensively for this feature, it categorizes pictures of my children as they are growing up, neatly under their name. So anytime I want to see pics of my kids, I just click on their name, and I have their entire visual timeline.

Google Photos, also, time to time, makes a slideshow video of my kids pictures, labeled as "They grow so fast" etc, its really amazing.

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

#385

Post by vishnumohandas »

reschlukas10 wrote: post #377

I think the idea is great, I'm looking for a E2EE photo service already for a long time. Although I'm not a security expert, I have some worries about your security concept. 1. When the user wants to change the password, all photos&videos have to be reencrypted and uploaded which is absurd for most people because ~100GB of photo-storage is not an exception these days anymore. 2. When your database is leaked, it is ve…

1. A user can change their password without re-encrypting any of the uploaded files. Changing the password only changes the encryptedMasterKey that is stored on the server.

2. Hashes of passwords are not stored at our server, and email addresses are stored encrypted.

You can read more about our key-encryption flow here: https://ente.io/architecture#key-encryption

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

#386

Post by UseStrict »

dotBen wrote: post #332
iknowstuff wrote: post #246

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…

Have you tried the Synology Photos app ( https://www.synology.com/en-global/DSM70/SynologyPhotos [1]) While it does have some kinks it's surprisingly good and has the features you are looking for in a locally hosted/publicly available option. You do have to buy one of their NAS's however. I have moved over to this partly for privacy and partly due to cost (I produce way too many photos per year to store them economic…

The biggest problem I've faced with their app suite is it seems to make my disks spin 24/7, constantly seeking even if there is zero external activity. It wouldn't be such a big problem if I didn't live in a small apartment and have to listen to them seek all night. Other people have reported the issue, but it doesn't seem like they plan on addressing it.

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

#387

Post by [deleted] »

ludjer wrote: post #382
istingray wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The size of the audience may be small indeed. But Apple users on average have deep pockets and are willing to spend. A quick search suggests Apple users spend >2x what Android users spend. No data yet on what Apple users spend compared to Linux users. It's part of the reason "but 5% marketshare!" was never a good argument against the rise of Mac/iPhone.

The moms and kids dropping 1000$ on candy crush every month are not going to switch off apple. The big spenders in apples echo system are not the tech literate. The tech literate normally cost way more to maintained from a client perspective. Also they are allot more concerned over costs with regards to space as seen by allot of comments on this page talking about how expensive storage is.

[deleted]

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

#388

Post by kingsloi »

skinkestek wrote: post #335
noduerme wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who's never used cloud-based photo browsers... I always assumed the facial recognition aspect was primarily for social media apps that try to tag known faces from a user's friends group, to put it in those people's news feeds or something. It's one reason I avoid being photographed and ask people not to tag my name to my face if they do post a photo I'm in. I'm wondering, what's the utility of facial recog…

> as I'm rethinking it, would this just be for searching your own images for a particular person...? My Synology NAS has face recognition and it is wonderful even if (actually: especially since) it has no pre-existing database and doesn't (to the best of my knowledge) share its database. For someone like me who manages family photos for the entire family but isn't to good at recognizing faces it is just brilliant.

I agree, Moments isn't a bad piece of software, especially being able to group/combine the same person, that is tagged as a different person. My newborn was like 50 different people when I first uploaded our pics, merging them together was as easy as a few clicks.

I wonder if it's a good idea to use Synology as onsite, and ente as 123 backup solution?

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

#389

Post by naasking »

Z_I_F_F wrote: post #232
pkursawe wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just put a price on it, ffs! Make it extensible with plugins. To gain 100% trust make it open source. I am happy to pay good money of a local, non-leaking AI based tagging software for video and photos.

Very surprised no one has mentioned Synology yet. This has been done. And it's awesome! I currently have a self-hosted google photos clone and I only paid for the hardware. Highly recommend.

Synology's Moments is ok, but it has issues. Not mobile friendly at all, can only create one shareable link per album, and others can't contribute their pictures to your album. Those are the biggest issues in my experience.

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

#390

Post by naasking »

missedthecue wrote: post #268
the_biot wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This sounds like mild inconvenience. What's evil about that?

Mild inconveniences can become problematic at scale. One person taking a crap in a lake is typically not a big deal. 1,000,000 people doing the same is a serious health risk. Scale matters.
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