> Honestly I'd imagine its more of an issue of, with encrypt then send, the only way you can browse your remote files, is to download them and then decrypt them

> Honestly I'd imagine its more of an issue of, with encrypt then send, the only way you can browse your remote files, is to download them and then decrypt them That's the only way to view any information: it has to be downloaded. > so that means no browsing thumbnails of what could be a large collection, no viewing dates or other information on those files (since that is information leaked). An client-side-encrypted photo store could easily support uploaded thumbnails (just not server-generated ones), and separate downloads for them. A client-side-encrypted data store could easily support separately-encrypted metadata, and there are some protocols for cryptographically-secure queries too.