Ente: Open-Source, E2E Encrypted, Google Photos Alternative
I’m looking a for photo-storage option for the long-run.
Open-source is not a must, but nice. E2E encryption is not a must, but nice.
I just want to place to store, edit(?), categorize, search, share my photos. And I don’t want to the place to be Google, Apple, or Microsoft. So, this does look interesting.
However, I also want to low-maintenance, low-cost, stable long-term solution. I value convenience.
What options should I consider?
Immich is a perfect photos app, and although still under heavy development it is quite polished already.
Low maintenance depends on your definition I suppose. As it’s under heavy development you do need to often change the config with a new update.
But it has a Google Photos like interface, facial recognition and object/scene recognition and searchability (all of this is done locally on the server), etc.
Immich is absolutely not perfect yet for every use case. A lot of people are looking for a photo server that can be used together with an existing Digikam archive and while Immich has recently added a read-only mode it still does not have good support for hierarchical tags which is necessary for that use case. I hope they will add that feature soon.
What would be the best way to set it up on a raspberry pi, keeping in mind privacy & security?
Proton Drive just added photo backup to their app. It’s new, and lacking features, but automatic backups and sharing are working.
The whole proton suite is pretty good, I’ve been very pleased.
I’m looking a for photo-storage option for the long-run.
Open-source is not a must
If you’re looking for anything “for the long run” then open source should be a must, because everything else will eventually become unsupported and without source code access you’d have no recourse to continue maintaining it.
Agree for self-hosted apps. However I’m also looking for a service like that one by ente.io. Here it’s more important that they continue to operate. Sure, with open-source you can self-host or find someone else, but this only works if the service is popular. Less popular open source apps disappaer when the developer gives up. The code would still available, but no one will keep it up-to-date.
And exactly this is why I use Google Photos in addition to hosting Photoprism. Google photos is too big to disappear overnight, but over the years I’ve seen nearly every open-source app I use go through the cycle of lost development interest. Eventually a dependency breaks and you’re back to searching for a new open source alternative or coffee to manually use some outdated dependency which from a security standpoint isn’t great.
