My son was just born, and while a few photos will go on the likes of Facebook and Instagram, overall my partner and I are wanting to keep our shared photos private from the EULA abuses that we all know and hate.
Does anyone here have any good suggestions? I would create my own front end, but I can’t swing hosting or a static IP to do it from my local box. Are there any companies out there who aren’t total shit bags who claim immediate irrevocable license to all of my photos to do with whatever the fuck they please?
Immich if you selfhost
This is the way, immich is insanely fast and performant
I think this is very close to what you are looking for. Recently they have open sourced all their server side code also. Means currently they are completely open source.
Seems too expensive. Most people that owned a phone with a camera for the last few years would easily be in the $200/yr plan. I know I am.
That’s the cost of Amazon and Walmart subscriptions combined just to get one benefit of Amazon subscription.
I realize people here tend to shit on Amazon, but they never leaked anyone’s photos so unless you share them yourself, they are perfectly safe in AWS cloud with unlimited storage.
I do:
- own domain with cloudflare
- ddns with their API
- NextCloud in docker
- caddy reverse proxy takes care of SSL cert
Or:
- Plex can do photos too and they have a docker container
- invite family to your server
Or:
- Immich with same setup as NextCloud
I self-host Photoprism, and use it to share albums privately with people.
The flow goes:
- I take pictures with my phone
- Those get synced via Syncthing to my photos folder.
- Photoprism is set up via docker, with my photos folder added.
This has potential in many ways. I will have to set it up and see how it feels.
Xmpp server with account for family members? Personally, I host one, and keep favourites pics on a minigal nano, a php app to share pictures on my webserver
Why can’t you self host? I have a wordpress site, and everything is fine, I use noIP for a domain name and IP tracking. Everything is running on a raspberry pi 4, with 7TB of USB storage. Loading up the photos can be a little slow when we post a big adventure day out, but if you’re patient, or have the means to put a more powerful machine on the job, it is the best way to share your lives with family. Wordpress has an option to ask the search engine crawler to not index the website, and it seems to work. When I post to the blog, I have an email subscription list for all my family, who want to be notified of a new post.
If you and your partner both have iphones then iCloud should be sufficient for keeping the photos to yourselves if you turn on Advanced Data Protection. I think it requires you and your partner to have two yubikeys at a minimum though.
https://support.apple.com/guide/security/advanced-data-protection-for-icloud-sec973254c5f
Photos encrypted at rest, only you and your partner will have access to the keys. If you want the convenience of icloud backup then the government would be able to subpoena your decryption keys from your phone backups, but it’s not going to be available for casual employee access. Automated tagging/face matching is done by your iPhone when it’s plugged in so there’s some organization. Nothing close to Google’s AI organization.
I know Apple is a shit company. But they’ve learned a thing or two after the Fappening.
Advanced Data Protection should be the minimum setting for you to consider Apple as your photo storage. Your photos will auto upload from your phones, apple has partner sharing so photo libraries will automatically be shared between you and your partner, and they recently implemented a system similar to “signal key verification”, but again limited to ADP turned on.
Otherwise you’re looking at Proton or Tresorit.
I will happily look at the alternatives. We avoid Apple like it carries the plague, mostly on my objections to their licensing policies alone. Also, I love that you linked to something about The Fappening, have a 💯 and my heartiest appreciation for you as a scholar and a gentleman.
I use DokuWiki for this type of thing. With a few add-ons it is nicely configurable (galleries, discussions etc), could be run from any webspace, and doesn’t need a database. You can have ACLs that make sure that only registered users get access. But it is a bit of a DIY solution, and takes a bit of work to set up.
I’m not above getting my hands dirty and this sounds like it could have promise. Thank you.
I mean, you can just use some simple hard drives if you just want something that works. You can get a terabyte for like 40 bucks nowadays.
So every time you have a couple new pics that you would upload to an online, album and share with your family/friends, you instead put them on a bunch of hard drives that cost 40 bucks each and post one to every contact?
I know you said you can’t do your local box, but there’s no necessity for a static IP to do that. Dynamic DNS is relatively easy to set up, I suppose provided you have a domain name you own (which you can find for very reasonable prices).
Or setup Tailscale and enable the Funnel feature for whatever service you want to expose.
This way it’s a bit more secure, since the exposed endpoint is hosted by Tailscale and routed to your device via your Tailscale (encrypted) network.
Using Funnel, no one needs to have the Tailscale client.
Syncthing
It can become really messy if one family member deletes a picture by accident and everyone complains. I’d use Syncthing for machines I personally manage.
You can control which devices can make and propagate changes to shared folders.
What are your requirements and desires for browsing/viewing?
Ideally, as easy to interface with as possible for non-tech literate users. My mother-in-law once told my wife “I don’t know why you would ever want to strengthen your mind.” in response to confronting my wife on why she was reading a book outside as a child instead of playing physically. This is a mantra she has continued well into her 50’s and is still going “strong”. I need something she can access and download pictures from to print off and hang on her wall like she does from FB now. This is essentially the low bar. Everyone else should be more competent than that.
Proton offers a cloud photo storage similar to Googles but its all E2EE. A bit clunky compared to google but much more privacy friendly.
Mega is e2ee and much cheaper
Mega doesn’t come with VPN, encrypted email and PW manager with integrated simplemail that ties in to your proton mail.
Different levels of service of course costs different amounts. If you don’t want or need any of the other things, then yeah Mega could be the best option for you.
Does come with vpn though https://mega.io/vpn
Pw manager bitwarden works great.
Proton mail is great but doesn’t really come with much usable cloud storage
Ah fair enough, didn’t know they also had a VPN service.
Does bitwarden integrate with something like simplemail to create unique addresses on the fly for accounts you create? That’s the feature I like the most about protons PW manager. I can easily just create a new mail address for an account somewhere that automatically forwards to my proton mail, but I can also answer with that unique mail from my proton mail.
I don’t use my mail for storage, and santiize content often, so I only need a few mb.
The 500gb on the drive is more than enough for my photo backup. There’s almost 10 years worth of photos on mine and I still have plenty space left.
Does bitwarden integrate with something like simplemail to create unique addresses on the fly for accounts you create?
I have bitwarden self-hosted, so I have no idea if they offer that with their cloud service (maybe look into the paid option, I think it’s just around 10 dollars a year), but the self-hosted does not have that option.
Bitwarden has email alias integration on free accounts
Wonder if it’s worth upgrading a proton mail subscription for cloud storage or having a separate mega is better, I already get 50gb on free tier
Proton
What is this photo storage thing? All I can find is proton drive.
Its part of proton drive. Drive has a section for photos.
