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

Hello HN,

Over the last year we've been building ente[1], a privacy-friendly, easy-to-use alternative to Google Photos. We've so far built Android[2][3], iOS[4], web[5] apps that encrypt your files and back them up in the background. You can access these across your devices, and share them with other ente users, end-to-end encrypted. You can also use our electron app[6] to maintain a local copy of your backed up files.

We've built a fault-tolerant data replication layer that replicates your data to two different storage providers in the EU. We will be providing additional replicas as an addon in the future.

We're relying on libsodium[7] for performing all cryptographic operations. Under the hood it uses XChaCha20 and XSalsa20 for encryption and Argon2 for key derivation.

We have documented our architecture[8] and open-sourced our clients[9].

We did a soft-launch on r/degoogle[10] sometime ago, and have since then ironed out issues and polished the product.

But we are far from where we want to be in terms of features (object and face detection, location clustering, image filters, ...) and user experience. We are hoping to use this post as an opportunity to collect feedback from fellow hackers.

If there's anything we can do better, please let us know, we would like to.

Best,

- Vishnu, Neeraj, Abhinav

[1]: https://ente.io

[2]: https://ente.io/apk

[3]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.ente.photos

[4]: https://apps.apple.com/in/app/ente-photos/id1542026904

[5]: https://web.ente.io

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

[7]: https://libsodium.gitbook.io

[8]: https://ente.io/architecture

[9]: https://github.com/ente-io

[10]: https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/njatok/we_built_a...

Kudos on your launch! I just had a question: the pricing plans seem slightly pricey, is it to break even before bringing prices down, or is it due to expensive storage? If the latter, is there a self-hosted option?

Also, the website looks absolutely great!

yes! googol is cheaper and the bottom line matters to lot of people. perhaps this is a good way to ask people whether they'd pay additional 5-10$ for privacy.

V cool service! What metadata do you store btw? Can I use it to store nice dslr pics and later sort by ISO?

self hosting is not worth the time and effort.