That’s my next project to get things from Google/Apple.
The options I’ve seen so far
- Immich: great if you can self-host, but I prefer not to, so that’s out for me
- Nextcloud on a VPS (Hetzner or others): you need E2EE to prevent the providers from seeing your photos, but then all the apps like Memories etc don’t work ( https://help.nextcloud.com/t/end-to-end-encryption-nextcloud/237705/3 )
- Ente: has E2EE embedded, the face recognition happens on the clients. Can be self-hostable, so that gives more trust that other providers can launch their own European instances in the future.
- https://zeitkapsl.eu/en/ : has E2EE, but no self hostable option, so you kind of have to trust them that they implement their design (which is actually kind of nice: https://zeitkapsl.eu/en/e2ee-architecture/ . They have a security audit on their roadmap (announced 8 days ago: https://zeitkapsl.featurebase.app/en/p/formal-security-audit )
Any option I am missing?
But if you get a VPS then you are self-hosting, so Immich is an option again?
If you need to have a so-called one-click solution, Zeitkapsl looks interesting (EU, yay) I guess.
And a general question, if you use SSL everything is encrypted anyhow? Or is the advertised E2EE something on top of that, which might be necessary if you don’t have your own certificate or don’t run your own server?
If you host Immich on a VPS, there are three scenarios
- You just install Immich on the VPS normally. In that case, the VPS provider (e.g. Hetzner) can access your photos. Not ideal for me.
- You use disk encryption to encrypt the whole disk at the disk level (such as https://www.accruedwisdom.com/articles/hetzner-lvm-full-disk-encryption/). Seems a bit cumbersome to be honest, and even if the link says how to do it, I’m not sure it’s completely allowed by Hetzner.
- You encrypt the files at the file level, but then you break most of the Immich features.
LUKS isn’t cumbersome, you should really enable it on nearly every Linux system.
Anyways, what do you mean “allowed”?
I have a Hetzner root server set up this way btw, have to ssh in to decrypt the zfs pool before boot.
Do note though, this does not protect from an attacker with physical access reading memory.
I use LUKS on my personal machines, I’m just not sure if I want to enable it for a VPS. Now if you tell me you’re doing that without any issue, that’s good to know.
this does not protect from an attacker with physical access reading memory.
So in this case, the VPS provider can still access your photos when they are being used by the photos management software?
Seems to be another argument for E2EE embedded photos software.
I mean… Depends on your threat model. Hetzner is a very reputable German hoster. The only way someone is going to try and read and puzzle together memory dumps is if you’re under investigation for something seriously heinous.
Shutting the VPS down also solves this.
But really, this is a general problem with every “someone else’s computer” solution.
E2EE still nice though, wish Immich had it.
I see. Thanks. E2EE would indeed be nice, but the Immich devs have made it clear for a long time that it woudn’t work due to the way Immich has been developed.
may i ask why self hosting isn’t an option?
i run immich on an old pc i literally found in a dumpster
My close family would rely on the hosted service for their photos.
I would prefer avoid having the responsibility of keeping the service availability and integrity.
I’m not the best at managing data (I lost a few years of pictures due to a hard drive failure and insufficient backup testing) and I don’t have a lot of time to allocate to that stuff, so I don’t trust myself with it
Self hosting is great but if you want to make sure you can’t lose your data, your backup should be in a different location than your main photo storage. Otherwise, in case of a fire or similar, you’ll lose everything.
jottacloud, self-hosted photoprism and syncthing with desktop-pc and nas.
https://ente.io/ is a paid service, not expensive, E2E encrypted, and maybe open-source.
Edit: sorry, you already mentioned it without the URL.
Yes I’m using Ente at the moment, ideally I would prefer to use a European provider (they would basically self host the Ente software with a fee for users), but at the moment there aren’t any that I know of.
I went through this dilemma too and actually talked with ente about it. It turns out that they did initially try to set it up in Europe as they are a global team, but the EU requirement for physical presence in the country was limiting for them.
They said that there were workarounds for this but decided on setting it up in the US because it was very straightforward with no workarounds or limitations
I like the way they are going with ente though and feel like it’s a fair price. The software works well too
Interesting, thank you
I only need to synchronize between my PC and smartphone, so I use syncthing.
What about https://www.photoprism.app/ ? Don’t know much about it, but perhaps worth a mention?
If I understand correctly, photoprism is also only self hosted? If that’s the case, I prefer not to (see my other comment: I’m just a bad sysadmin)
This has been working for me without fail for a decade: I take the photos, maybe post one or two of them on social media, never look at them again, realize I need to free up space, ask my partner if we need any photo’s from the last 6 months and delete them.
