13 ms·

Open-source photo gallery with cloud backup and end-to-end encryption

255 points by wh33zle 6y ago

speedgoose 6y ago
Nice to see xchacha20poly1305 and x25519.
bergstromm466 6y ago
This looks amazing. I'm so grateful for these alternatives popping up. All we need is to have it be interoperable with something like http://CoBox.cloud http://CoBox.cloud (a distributed, encrypted, offline-enabled data hosting cloud platform) and we can set up our own fully encrypted, NSA-impenetrable/surveillance-less cooperative community servers/'cloud'. In other words, we would benefit from the same economies of scale and low maintance costs that the existing FAANG server farms benefit from, without the invasive privacy transgressions from big corps.
- olah_1 6y ago
  Yeah cobox rules. Especially the functionality to seed data that you don’t have access to. Their documentation is super nice too.
andrewshadura 6y ago
The server side doesn't seem to be free software, am I missing something?
- wh33zle 6y ago
  It isn't no. In their telegram group they said they want to keep it closed for now to make it easier to monetize. Their argument is that all the relevant cryptography happens client-side.
  - Scaevolus 6y ago
    It's similar to the Tarsnap model, except this uses GPL-licensed client apps so you can implement your own backend legally.
  - sneak 6y ago
    > In their telegram group This makes me run from cryptography implementors.
sairamkunala 6y ago
Mobile Apps are open source, this is not an self hosted solution.
satyanash 6y ago
If the server-side contract is documented, the open source mobile apps should be easily reconfigurable to point to a self-hosted implementation.
- rglullis 6y ago
  Yeah, I was reading this and my immediate thought was to take the client and store on IPFS and/or integrate with Syncthing.
omnifischer 6y ago
I cannot find a real postal contact address anywhere.
- njitram 6y ago
  Not even on their github, blog or privacy policy you can find any names or addresses..
- bartvk 6y ago
  What conclusion do you draw from this? I'm curious because it's pretty easy to find a postal address for any giant company, however what will you gain from it?
  - dewey 6y ago
    You'd at least know what jurisdiction the service is located in. If you run a company like that that wants to take care of people's private and most valuable data you should put as much information of you out there to gain trust.
    - xenocratus 6y ago
      This seems to be their founder/CEO: https://www.amiryan.org/ https://www.amiryan.org/ (at least, says so on his GH profile: https://github.com/alexamiryan https://github.com/alexamiryan )
  - chippy 6y ago
    try finding any type of contact information, a name, an email, a company name. There is nothing. What I gain is trust, without it, I have suspicion.
genidoi 6y ago
Out of all the 1s and 0s that I want backed up in the cloud for an indefinite period of time, nothing is as irreplaceable as a photo/video that will make me smile 2/5/10/20+ years from now. I'd argue that the threat of "X is shutting down" or worse, "X has shut down" but it landed in my spam 3 months ago is worse than any benefits that a non-FAANG co can offer me. At least with keeping backups on icloud/Gphotos, I know that both co's would kill those services abrubtly as their last dying wish.
- hjuutilainen 6y ago
  This is exactly the reason I recently chose to move all my photos to Adobe Creative Cloud and also keep them backed up to multiple separate locations. Almost all other data I can recreate (even if it took years) but the memories I have through photos and videos are irreplaceable.
  - awestroke 6y ago
    How do you back them up to separate locations? Do you use some kind of adobe application or script to sync? If you delete something from the Adobe cloud, is it deleted from your backups too? What do you use for sharing albums with friends? What do you use for displaying photos on a TV?
    - hjuutilainen 6y ago
      I have one computer which always has all originals locally available. That computer is backed up with borg to three separate borg repos (1 local, 2 remote). I use iCloud photos for sharing with friends and family.
- hyko 6y ago
  Yes and no. Backups that you control (physically, technically, and legally) are the only complete mitigation against someone else losing your digital memories. That applies to a FAANG as well as a startup, although startups are far more likely to just flame out as you say.
lurtbancaster 6y ago
Not on F-Droid? https://f-droid.org/ https://f-droid.org/
- wh33zle 6y ago
  There is an open issue on GitHub tracking this: https://github.com/stingle/stingle-photos-android/issues/16 https://github.com/stingle/stingle-photos-android/issues/16
blfr 6y ago
Is there something like this but self-hosted? Data encrypted on the client with a good client for Android (and maybe Linux), simple sharing feature for selected items. Free/Libre Google Photos, basically.
- OJFord 6y ago
  I've been following OwnPhotos' (sporadic) development for a while: https://github.com/hooram/ownphotos https://github.com/hooram/ownphotos
  - OJFord 6y ago
    Woah via 'project abandoned' issue there, where some contributors have been discussing forking and continuing (but nothing happening yet in nearly a year of that), I just came across https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism - seems great, further along, and more used (as measured by GitHub stars..).
- izacus 6y ago
  It's not quite free/libre, but I was positively surprised by Synology Moments. It's basically a software package on the Synology NAS which creates a locally hosted version of Google Photos (including sharing and gallery capability). It comes with Android/iOS apps that can automatically backups all photos directly to your NAS and thus stay in your own ownership. There is a cost of entrance though - you need to buy the NAS and harddrives... but IMO there's nothing quite like owning your own data.
  - ObsoleteNerd 6y ago
    I absolutely love my Synology NAS. The photos function and the Video one especially. Being able to access all the videos on my NAS from any computer/phone/tablet in the house and have them transcode in real-time to suit the device, and/or cast them to our TVs. It’s great.
    - anderspitman 6y ago
ianopolous 6y ago
This looks great, they have some nice properties. If you're interested in this you'll probably also be interested in Peergos [1][2] (disclaimer: I'm a co-founder), which has stronger privacy properties. Peergos is an E2EE P2P global filesystem built on top of IPFS, and we have a built in photo/video/audio gallery/player (and other apps too). We don't expose the social graph (who is sharing with who) to the server, and we also obscure things like the number of files, number of directories, size of individual files, even whether something is a directory or file. We are also designed to be resistant to exposure by a quantum computer (mainly we don't rely on asymmetric encryption for privacy, only for sharing, and even for sharing we take measures to protect against a future quantum computer). We also don't rely on DNS or the TLS certificate authorities for security (unless you choose to use the web interface to a public server). We do fine-grained server-less access control using a structure called cryptree [3]. It's P2P so you can mirror your data as many times as you like or just self-host. It's also 100% open source, both client side and server side. [1] https://peergos.org https://peergos.org [2] https://github.com/peergos/peergos https://github.com/peergos/peergos [3] https://book.peergos.org/security/cryptree.html https://book.peergos.org/security/cryptree.html
- anderspitman 6y ago
  What's your alternative for DNS/CAs? Let's say someone wanted to host the source code for youtube-dl. How would that look on Peergos, and would it be an improvement over the current system?
  - ianopolous 6y ago
    It is effectively routing by public key - similar to how a Tor hidden service doesn't require DNS or TLS CAs for you to connect securely to it. The underlying tech we use is p2p streams in libp2p (part of IPFS) which allow you to dial a public key. The actual IPs of the node are looked up in a DHT, and then the connection can be authenticated without a CA because you already have the public key (the stream itself is TLS1.3). Any file/dir chunk in Peergos has an address which has 3 parts (owner public key, writer public key, and a random 32 byte label). Most data is content addressed, so no need for location based addressing at all. Modifications need to be routed to the owners storage server, which is done using the p2p stream method just described.
ig0r0 6y ago
I wonder if the iOS app is really "coming soon" as the last commit is from July
headmelted 6y ago
I see .org and I assume there’s some element of Libre software at play here in terms of the spirit of what you’ve developed. By that I mean to say that I looked at this and thought “great, an O/S backup solution for a NAS” as opposed to a paid-only service akin to a multitude of others.
vr46 6y ago
Very grateful for this work, will be checking it out ASAP. Pricing is on the high side, I would say, but the openness could make up for it.
albertzeyer 6y ago
If you care about backing up your photos (and other media), for an indefinite period of time, the Perkeep (https://perkeep.org/ https://perkeep.org/) (earlier Camlistore) is very relevant. > Perkeep (née Camlistore) is a set of open source formats, protocols, and software for modeling, storing, searching, sharing and synchronizing data in the post-PC era. Data may be files or objects, tweets or 5TB videos, and you can access it via a phone, browser or FUSE filesystem. Edit Downvoted? I don't understand. Perkeep contains the same functionality as the post, but much more, is much more mature, and is totally open source (not like the posted software, where the important core, the server, is closed source).
- AnonC 6y ago
  I didn’t downvote, but I checked it out and see that it’s at version 0.10 and the last update was more than two years ago. The combination of these two don’t inspire much confidence for me. There’s a psychological barrier for pre 1.0 releases that must be handled in any serious project.
  - albertzeyer 6y ago
    Ok, that's maybe fair, if you have not heard of it before. You might have heard of the main developer, Brad Fitzpatrick (https://github.com/bradfitz https://github.com/bradfitz). Anyway, your argument was discussed very recently here: https://github.com/perkeep/perkeep/issues/1307 https://github.com/perkeep/perkeep/issues/1307 Perkeep was also a couple of times on HN before, e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18008240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18008240 This is an interesting overview/comparison to maybe understand a bit better about the goals: https://perkeep.org/doc/compare https://perkeep.org/doc/compare And this: https://github.com/perkeep/perkeep/blob/master/doc/overview.txt https://github.com/perkeep/perkeep/blob/master/doc/overview....
richardARPANET 6y ago
Mega.nz also does this, 50GB for free.
owenversteeg 6y ago
I am in the market for exactly something like this (aka a cloud based photo gallery.) I currently use Flickr, but they have a mountain of issues and they're also closed source/not encrypted. Unfortunately the pricing does turn me off a bit. For up to 300gb of photos, you'd pay the same as Flickr, but I happen to have slightly north of 300gb and so I'd pay more than double the price of Flickr. And Flickr offers unlimited storage... What I'd really love is something I can self host. OwnPhotos seems super cool, but apparently it's not stable yet. Are there any alternatives that can be run today?
umaar 6y ago
Would this Google Archive storage class be a good place to backup photos/videos to? it costs $1.23 per TB per month! https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/storage-data-transfer/archive-storage-class-for-coldest-data-now-available https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/storage-data-transfer...
- solarkraft 6y ago
  Looks quite good to me - Are there any european/general alternatives?
upofadown 6y ago
This doesn't look to be effectively end to end encrypted for album sharing. There is no way to verify the identity of the people you are sharing with so the provider can trivially MITM the keys.
sam_lowry_ 6y ago
I just do a regular adb pull, sort pictures in folders by date using exif, then review them and add mnemonic suffixes to folders, then backup to local storage and to cloud with encrypted restic. Yes, it is a bit of a hassle, but I feel like I own these photos.
vishnumohandas 6y ago
Shameless plug: I found Stingle to lack a few basic features (multi device sync, memories, location search, effortless sharing etc) and have been building an alternative[1]. If this is a problem you’d like to see solved, please sign up for the beta program, I’d be grateful! [1]: https://ente.io https://ente.io
- e12e 6y ago
  Hm, neither of these appear to support self-hosting the server/data component? That's what I'd be most interested in as an alternative to eg: Google photos.
  - vishnumohandas 6y ago
    I had started ente.io as a self-hosted project, but soon realized that to appeal to a larger audience, and to pay rent while working on this full time, I’ve to ship a cloud based solution first. Maintaining a self hosted alternative in parallel requires bandwidth which I currently lack. Once the product is mature and has sufficient traction, it would be in my best interest to open source the server.
    - e12e 6y ago
      Fair enough - I couldn't tell from looking that the server might end up open sourced - maybe I didn't look carefully enough? I'd love set of protocols, client and server that combined self-host with cloud - ie: I could self host a shard/mirror for my data, while paying someone for a service too. That way supporting development and have an option in case the project shuts down. I'll look into https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism for now, I think. Looks like it provides the minimum I need (self host, à way to upload dslr photos, an Android client for mobile pictures).
      - vishnumohandas 6y ago
        In the unfortunate scenario where in I’ve to shut down ente.io, I’d definitely open source every bit of code I’ve written so that my efforts wouldn’t be in vain. But I’d understand your skepticism. If you are keen on self hosting, I’d also recommend checking out Piwigo[1] which is actively maintained. [1]: https://piwigo.org https://piwigo.org
aequitas 6y ago
I'm missing a desktop application so I can also browse my pictures from my desktop. Which also has the added benifit that it syncs to local disk which creates an additional backup (plus one more if you include the desktop backup itself).
miloc_c 6y ago
Take back control of your photos and videos privacy. Available in Google Play and App Store. It would be easier to believe if F-Droid was also listed.
- sm4rk0 6y ago
  It's just added to IzzyOnDroid repo[0]. But that's not a real thing... ...which is work in progress[1] 0: https://android.izzysoft.de/repo/apk/org.stingle.photos https://android.izzysoft.de/repo/apk/org.stingle.photos 1: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/rfp/-/issues/1191 https://gitlab.com/fdroid/rfp/-/issues/1191
sbkg0002 6y ago
Great alternatives, but without selfhosting it's just the other bad alternative.
Brajeshwar 6y ago
I'm not a serious photographer but I love it enough to shoot enough. I use Apple's iCloud with a 2TB plan as my primary. I back it up with Google One's 2TB family plan where we have a common family photos (wife, and I)and my 11-year old daughter learning to shoot. The Google Photos is more because Apple has no correct implementation of sharing/collaborating between the family members. - Stingle is costlier than Apple or Google's plan. - It does not say anywhere that this is open source and I can host it myself, plugged in with a storage such as AWS S3 or Wasabi or any other cloud that I can backup/store etc. So far, NextCloud[1] seems to be the best bet with PhotoSync[2] keeping a local/cloud backup. I need the ability to share photos with an expansive network of families/relatives on different platforms such as Android, Windows, Mac, Linux. I haven't found any other services and am beginning to believe I have a weird and different needs than most. 1. https://nextcloud.com https://nextcloud.com 2. https://www.photosync-app.com/ https://www.photosync-app.com/
- spurgu 6y ago
  > - It does not say anywhere that this is open source and I can host it myself, plugged in with a storage such as AWS S3 or Wasabi or any other cloud that I can backup/store etc. It doesn't, which sucks. I was hoping for the exact same thing. It only says that the client is open source, so you can verify that your photos are actually encrypted.
- tannhaeuser 6y ago
  > It does not say anywhere that this is open source and I can host it myself, plugged in with a storage such as AWS S3 or Wasabi or any other cloud that I can backup/store etc. Ask yourself why would an open-source tool provide "cloud storage"? To bring more customers to the respective cloud provider? It's also not particularly altruistic in a FOSS sense to lock your photos into cloud plans.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - shirakawasuna 6y ago
    NextCloud already offers photo sync and gallery functionality that you can self-host. 100% free and open source.
testesttest 6y ago
Looks like the server component is not open source? It doesn't look like it would be hard to write an open source backend. I use Dropbox and a second copy backend up to my personal server (via Dropbox cli) for photos. Owning that data is too important for me to use a random service accessable only via a phone app.
mtgx 6y ago
Some feedback on pricing: The 1GB free is nothing to write home about, and it's basically just a "free trial" kind of thing, at best. If they really wanted to hook users in, they should consider offering at least 5GB free. The jump from 1 GB free to 100GB for $30 a year is too large. I think they are missing a lot of people in-between. I have quite a lot of photos, but I don't think I'll need 100GB anytime soon. $30 a year for something like this when I could just use Google Photos for my purposes for free is still too much. So I suggest at least 1-2 other plans in between, such as 10GB for $5 a year and 20GB a year for $8 a year. Or if you do offer the 5GB for free, maybe just 15-20GB for $10 a year. I think you'd get a lot more "paying customers" this way, even if they aren't super profitable (they might just be, as the ones that need a ton of space are actually the ones that utilizes everything to the max, while normal people tend to overestimate how much they need). But once you get this larger audience hooked, it's easier to get them to upgrade when they need more.
dmje 6y ago
Looks nice. I spent ages trying to find a solution that does a nice mix of cross platform, own hard drive, cloud. I eventually found it in the shape of https://mylio.com/ https://mylio.com/ Along lines of other comments here, none of my other material has even like the same value as my family photos, so I'm stupendously careful with redundancy / multi location backup. In case anyone cares: local HDD attached to Mac, Synology on local network, folder on there synced to Dropbox and finally Synology C2. Too far I know, but it's worth it. Mylio is fast, clever (has a nice P2P model for in-network syncing), doesn't have to hit any cloud service if you don't want it to, good search, great management tools. I rate it highly.
- sm4rk0 6y ago
  Great, but client's not opensource...
iso8859-1 6y ago
Surprised that nobody is mentioning MediaMonkey. What are your experiences?
sneak 6y ago
> We are strong proponents of open source software and we believe that trust comes from transparency and openness, that’s why Stingle Photos is an open source software released under GPLv3 license. Everyone is free to review, audit, and contribute to the Stingle Photos codebase. Source code transparency is an absolute requirement for security and privacy oriented software solutions like Stingle Photos. Only the client software is Free Software, the server component has not been released, in source or object form. That sort of calls this whole paragraph into question.
enfotoad 6y ago
Adding my 2 cents on how I approach storing important family photos: 1. Minimize footprint. Keep only the photos that matter; this usually ends up being the ones with you or a loved one in the picture. I spent a weekend consolidating and reduced all my photos for the last 20 years down to 15GB. 2. Use 1 consumer-grade service like Google Photos for easy day-to-day access and sharing; just makes life easier for you and your loved ones to access memories on-demand. This can be substituted with any privacy-friendly alternative or young service like Stingle. 3. Use 1 business-grade storage solution for an off-site backup. Business-grade is critical b/c it enhances the relationship and SLA the provider gives you. I use AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive; it's free to upload, cheap to store ($0.00099/GB/month), and a bit pricey to retrieve ($0.09/GB for egress). This is my last-resort/lifeline if everything else goes wrong and I need to get my data again. To save on per-file upload fees, I zip up pictures by album or year and use 7Zip or Keka to encrypt the zip with a password using AES-256 for added privacy. Also remember, AWS is creating at least 3 copies of your data across 3 AZs in one region! 4. Keep a copy of the pictures at home on an NAS, hard drive, or better yet your computer if you have the space. I already use Time Machine to auto backup my entire Mac on an external drive so this gives me in total 2 copies of my pictures (one on laptop and one on time machine backup). In total this gives me 6 total copies of my pictures: - 1x Off-site Google Photos - 3x Off-site AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive - 1x On-site Laptop - 1x On-site Laptop's Time Machine Backup I'm not too concerned if one service provider loses my pics or revokes my access; plenty more copies! Please remember this only works if you religiously follow step 1. This will be an expensive and almost impractical setup if you enjoy holding onto 5TB+ worth of photos.
- lucb1e 6y ago
  Okay but how does this relate to the topic? Could you swap this product for the one you currently use for the second point, is that what you're saying? You seem to be advertising for a Google alternative in a thread about encrypted open source photo storage? I'm confused.
ylere 6y ago
Does any one know of a solution like this that also supports face detection and automatic scene/object recognition? That are the killer features that are currently keeping me at Google Photos but I really don't like the privacy implications of using it.
stiltzkin 6y ago
You are in time to add native support for Android TV, there is not even a native Google Photo app for Android TV and this could be a great addition. *Some people would suggest side load it but your app needs to be compatible with remote control and TV layout.
ChicagoDave 6y ago
I use NAS for my photos since I wouldn't trust any cloud even if the photos are encrypted. As for an organizer, nothing has replaced Picasa and it's a shame Google didn't open source it.
- choward 6y ago
  Why wouldn't you trust it if you encrypted them yourself? Are you afraid they'll break the encryption, lose the data, or collect other data such as when you upload?
  - ChicagoDave 6y ago
    I have an unhealthy mistrust of online storage, especially with something as personal as photographs. I started taking digital photos in 2000 and have digital video as well.
OneLeggedCat 6y ago
Open-source, but Android or iPhone only?
rswail 6y ago
I have a Mac and I have Office 365 with its free 1TB storage. My photo library location is on OneDrive and my phone stream is synced to the Mac. My Mac is also backed up to NAS. So my pics are in two different physical locations and one offsite. I guess I should have an external drive that I make regular backups to and then take offsite somewhere as well.
el_don_almighty 6y ago
I want Picasa + Web Gallery I miss the excellent facial tagging that Picasa offered and none of these solutions offers any facial tags.
m-p-3 6y ago
Sadly the mobile app I use (Cryptomator) isn't open source but the encryption system used is, and it allows doing an automatic backup to an encrypted volume that can be synced in the cloud.

255 points by wh33zle 6y ago

Nice to see xchacha20poly1305 and x25519.

This looks amazing. I'm so grateful for these alternatives popping up. All we need is to have it be interoperable with something like http://CoBox.cloud http://CoBox.cloud (a distributed, encrypted, offline-enabled data hosting cloud platform) and we can set up our own fully encrypted, NSA-impenetrable/surveillance-less cooperative community servers/'cloud'. In other words, we would benefit from the same economies of scale and low maintance costs that the existing FAANG server farms benefit from, without the invasive privacy transgressions from big corps.

olah_1 6y ago
Yeah cobox rules. Especially the functionality to seed data that you don’t have access to. Their documentation is super nice too.

andrewshadura 6y ago

The server side doesn't seem to be free software, am I missing something?

wh33zle 6y ago
It isn't no. In their telegram group they said they want to keep it closed for now to make it easier to monetize. Their argument is that all the relevant cryptography happens client-side.
- Scaevolus 6y ago
  It's similar to the Tarsnap model, except this uses GPL-licensed client apps so you can implement your own backend legally.
- sneak 6y ago
  > In their telegram group This makes me run from cryptography implementors.

sairamkunala 6y ago

Mobile Apps are open source, this is not an self hosted solution.

satyanash 6y ago

If the server-side contract is documented, the open source mobile apps should be easily reconfigurable to point to a self-hosted implementation.

rglullis 6y ago
Yeah, I was reading this and my immediate thought was to take the client and store on IPFS and/or integrate with Syncthing.

omnifischer 6y ago

I cannot find a real postal contact address anywhere.

njitram 6y ago
Not even on their github, blog or privacy policy you can find any names or addresses..
bartvk 6y ago
What conclusion do you draw from this? I'm curious because it's pretty easy to find a postal address for any giant company, however what will you gain from it?
- dewey 6y ago
  You'd at least know what jurisdiction the service is located in. If you run a company like that that wants to take care of people's private and most valuable data you should put as much information of you out there to gain trust.
  - xenocratus 6y ago
    This seems to be their founder/CEO: https://www.amiryan.org/ https://www.amiryan.org/ (at least, says so on his GH profile: https://github.com/alexamiryan https://github.com/alexamiryan )
- chippy 6y ago
  try finding any type of contact information, a name, an email, a company name. There is nothing. What I gain is trust, without it, I have suspicion.

genidoi 6y ago

Out of all the 1s and 0s that I want backed up in the cloud for an indefinite period of time, nothing is as irreplaceable as a photo/video that will make me smile 2/5/10/20+ years from now. I'd argue that the threat of "X is shutting down" or worse, "X has shut down" but it landed in my spam 3 months ago is worse than any benefits that a non-FAANG co can offer me. At least with keeping backups on icloud/Gphotos, I know that both co's would kill those services abrubtly as their last dying wish.

hjuutilainen 6y ago
This is exactly the reason I recently chose to move all my photos to Adobe Creative Cloud and also keep them backed up to multiple separate locations. Almost all other data I can recreate (even if it took years) but the memories I have through photos and videos are irreplaceable.
- awestroke 6y ago
  How do you back them up to separate locations? Do you use some kind of adobe application or script to sync? If you delete something from the Adobe cloud, is it deleted from your backups too? What do you use for sharing albums with friends? What do you use for displaying photos on a TV?
  - hjuutilainen 6y ago
    I have one computer which always has all originals locally available. That computer is backed up with borg to three separate borg repos (1 local, 2 remote). I use iCloud photos for sharing with friends and family.
hyko 6y ago
Yes and no. Backups that you control (physically, technically, and legally) are the only complete mitigation against someone else losing your digital memories. That applies to a FAANG as well as a startup, although startups are far more likely to just flame out as you say.

lurtbancaster 6y ago

Not on F-Droid? https://f-droid.org/ https://f-droid.org/

wh33zle 6y ago
There is an open issue on GitHub tracking this: https://github.com/stingle/stingle-photos-android/issues/16 https://github.com/stingle/stingle-photos-android/issues/16

blfr 6y ago

Is there something like this but self-hosted? Data encrypted on the client with a good client for Android (and maybe Linux), simple sharing feature for selected items. Free/Libre Google Photos, basically.

OJFord 6y ago
I've been following OwnPhotos' (sporadic) development for a while: https://github.com/hooram/ownphotos https://github.com/hooram/ownphotos
- OJFord 6y ago
  Woah via 'project abandoned' issue there, where some contributors have been discussing forking and continuing (but nothing happening yet in nearly a year of that), I just came across https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism - seems great, further along, and more used (as measured by GitHub stars..).
izacus 6y ago
It's not quite free/libre, but I was positively surprised by Synology Moments. It's basically a software package on the Synology NAS which creates a locally hosted version of Google Photos (including sharing and gallery capability). It comes with Android/iOS apps that can automatically backups all photos directly to your NAS and thus stay in your own ownership. There is a cost of entrance though - you need to buy the NAS and harddrives... but IMO there's nothing quite like owning your own data.
- ObsoleteNerd 6y ago
  I absolutely love my Synology NAS. The photos function and the Video one especially. Being able to access all the videos on my NAS from any computer/phone/tablet in the house and have them transcode in real-time to suit the device, and/or cast them to our TVs. It’s great.
  - anderspitman 6y ago

ianopolous 6y ago

This looks great, they have some nice properties. If you're interested in this you'll probably also be interested in Peergos [1][2] (disclaimer: I'm a co-founder), which has stronger privacy properties. Peergos is an E2EE P2P global filesystem built on top of IPFS, and we have a built in photo/video/audio gallery/player (and other apps too). We don't expose the social graph (who is sharing with who) to the server, and we also obscure things like the number of files, number of directories, size of individual files, even whether something is a directory or file. We are also designed to be resistant to exposure by a quantum computer (mainly we don't rely on asymmetric encryption for privacy, only for sharing, and even for sharing we take measures to protect against a future quantum computer). We also don't rely on DNS or the TLS certificate authorities for security (unless you choose to use the web interface to a public server). We do fine-grained server-less access control using a structure called cryptree [3]. It's P2P so you can mirror your data as many times as you like or just self-host. It's also 100% open source, both client side and server side. [1] https://peergos.org https://peergos.org [2] https://github.com/peergos/peergos https://github.com/peergos/peergos [3] https://book.peergos.org/security/cryptree.html https://book.peergos.org/security/cryptree.html

anderspitman 6y ago
What's your alternative for DNS/CAs? Let's say someone wanted to host the source code for youtube-dl. How would that look on Peergos, and would it be an improvement over the current system?
- ianopolous 6y ago
  It is effectively routing by public key - similar to how a Tor hidden service doesn't require DNS or TLS CAs for you to connect securely to it. The underlying tech we use is p2p streams in libp2p (part of IPFS) which allow you to dial a public key. The actual IPs of the node are looked up in a DHT, and then the connection can be authenticated without a CA because you already have the public key (the stream itself is TLS1.3). Any file/dir chunk in Peergos has an address which has 3 parts (owner public key, writer public key, and a random 32 byte label). Most data is content addressed, so no need for location based addressing at all. Modifications need to be routed to the owners storage server, which is done using the p2p stream method just described.

ig0r0 6y ago

I wonder if the iOS app is really "coming soon" as the last commit is from July

headmelted 6y ago

I see .org and I assume there’s some element of Libre software at play here in terms of the spirit of what you’ve developed. By that I mean to say that I looked at this and thought “great, an O/S backup solution for a NAS” as opposed to a paid-only service akin to a multitude of others.

vr46 6y ago

Very grateful for this work, will be checking it out ASAP. Pricing is on the high side, I would say, but the openness could make up for it.

albertzeyer 6y ago

If you care about backing up your photos (and other media), for an indefinite period of time, the Perkeep (https://perkeep.org/ https://perkeep.org/) (earlier Camlistore) is very relevant. > Perkeep (née Camlistore) is a set of open source formats, protocols, and software for modeling, storing, searching, sharing and synchronizing data in the post-PC era. Data may be files or objects, tweets or 5TB videos, and you can access it via a phone, browser or FUSE filesystem. Edit Downvoted? I don't understand. Perkeep contains the same functionality as the post, but much more, is much more mature, and is totally open source (not like the posted software, where the important core, the server, is closed source).

AnonC 6y ago
I didn’t downvote, but I checked it out and see that it’s at version 0.10 and the last update was more than two years ago. The combination of these two don’t inspire much confidence for me. There’s a psychological barrier for pre 1.0 releases that must be handled in any serious project.
- albertzeyer 6y ago
  Ok, that's maybe fair, if you have not heard of it before. You might have heard of the main developer, Brad Fitzpatrick (https://github.com/bradfitz https://github.com/bradfitz). Anyway, your argument was discussed very recently here: https://github.com/perkeep/perkeep/issues/1307 https://github.com/perkeep/perkeep/issues/1307 Perkeep was also a couple of times on HN before, e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18008240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18008240 This is an interesting overview/comparison to maybe understand a bit better about the goals: https://perkeep.org/doc/compare https://perkeep.org/doc/compare And this: https://github.com/perkeep/perkeep/blob/master/doc/overview.txt https://github.com/perkeep/perkeep/blob/master/doc/overview....

richardARPANET 6y ago

Mega.nz also does this, 50GB for free.

owenversteeg 6y ago

I am in the market for exactly something like this (aka a cloud based photo gallery.) I currently use Flickr, but they have a mountain of issues and they're also closed source/not encrypted. Unfortunately the pricing does turn me off a bit. For up to 300gb of photos, you'd pay the same as Flickr, but I happen to have slightly north of 300gb and so I'd pay more than double the price of Flickr. And Flickr offers unlimited storage... What I'd really love is something I can self host. OwnPhotos seems super cool, but apparently it's not stable yet. Are there any alternatives that can be run today?

umaar 6y ago

Would this Google Archive storage class be a good place to backup photos/videos to? it costs $1.23 per TB per month! https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/storage-data-transfer/archive-storage-class-for-coldest-data-now-available https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/storage-data-transfer...

solarkraft 6y ago
Looks quite good to me - Are there any european/general alternatives?

upofadown 6y ago

This doesn't look to be effectively end to end encrypted for album sharing. There is no way to verify the identity of the people you are sharing with so the provider can trivially MITM the keys.

sam_lowry_ 6y ago

I just do a regular adb pull, sort pictures in folders by date using exif, then review them and add mnemonic suffixes to folders, then backup to local storage and to cloud with encrypted restic. Yes, it is a bit of a hassle, but I feel like I own these photos.

vishnumohandas 6y ago

Shameless plug: I found Stingle to lack a few basic features (multi device sync, memories, location search, effortless sharing etc) and have been building an alternative[1]. If this is a problem you’d like to see solved, please sign up for the beta program, I’d be grateful! [1]: https://ente.io https://ente.io

e12e 6y ago
Hm, neither of these appear to support self-hosting the server/data component? That's what I'd be most interested in as an alternative to eg: Google photos.
- vishnumohandas 6y ago
  I had started ente.io as a self-hosted project, but soon realized that to appeal to a larger audience, and to pay rent while working on this full time, I’ve to ship a cloud based solution first. Maintaining a self hosted alternative in parallel requires bandwidth which I currently lack. Once the product is mature and has sufficient traction, it would be in my best interest to open source the server.
  - e12e 6y ago
    Fair enough - I couldn't tell from looking that the server might end up open sourced - maybe I didn't look carefully enough? I'd love set of protocols, client and server that combined self-host with cloud - ie: I could self host a shard/mirror for my data, while paying someone for a service too. That way supporting development and have an option in case the project shuts down. I'll look into https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism for now, I think. Looks like it provides the minimum I need (self host, à way to upload dslr photos, an Android client for mobile pictures).
    - vishnumohandas 6y ago
      In the unfortunate scenario where in I’ve to shut down ente.io, I’d definitely open source every bit of code I’ve written so that my efforts wouldn’t be in vain. But I’d understand your skepticism. If you are keen on self hosting, I’d also recommend checking out Piwigo[1] which is actively maintained. [1]: https://piwigo.org https://piwigo.org

aequitas 6y ago

I'm missing a desktop application so I can also browse my pictures from my desktop. Which also has the added benifit that it syncs to local disk which creates an additional backup (plus one more if you include the desktop backup itself).

miloc_c 6y ago

Take back control of your photos and videos privacy. Available in Google Play and App Store. It would be easier to believe if F-Droid was also listed.

sm4rk0 6y ago
It's just added to IzzyOnDroid repo[0]. But that's not a real thing... ...which is work in progress[1] 0: https://android.izzysoft.de/repo/apk/org.stingle.photos https://android.izzysoft.de/repo/apk/org.stingle.photos 1: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/rfp/-/issues/1191 https://gitlab.com/fdroid/rfp/-/issues/1191

sbkg0002 6y ago

Great alternatives, but without selfhosting it's just the other bad alternative.

Brajeshwar 6y ago

I'm not a serious photographer but I love it enough to shoot enough. I use Apple's iCloud with a 2TB plan as my primary. I back it up with Google One's 2TB family plan where we have a common family photos (wife, and I)and my 11-year old daughter learning to shoot. The Google Photos is more because Apple has no correct implementation of sharing/collaborating between the family members. - Stingle is costlier than Apple or Google's plan. - It does not say anywhere that this is open source and I can host it myself, plugged in with a storage such as AWS S3 or Wasabi or any other cloud that I can backup/store etc. So far, NextCloud[1] seems to be the best bet with PhotoSync[2] keeping a local/cloud backup. I need the ability to share photos with an expansive network of families/relatives on different platforms such as Android, Windows, Mac, Linux. I haven't found any other services and am beginning to believe I have a weird and different needs than most. 1. https://nextcloud.com https://nextcloud.com 2. https://www.photosync-app.com/ https://www.photosync-app.com/

spurgu 6y ago
> - It does not say anywhere that this is open source and I can host it myself, plugged in with a storage such as AWS S3 or Wasabi or any other cloud that I can backup/store etc. It doesn't, which sucks. I was hoping for the exact same thing. It only says that the client is open source, so you can verify that your photos are actually encrypted.
tannhaeuser 6y ago
> It does not say anywhere that this is open source and I can host it myself, plugged in with a storage such as AWS S3 or Wasabi or any other cloud that I can backup/store etc. Ask yourself why would an open-source tool provide "cloud storage"? To bring more customers to the respective cloud provider? It's also not particularly altruistic in a FOSS sense to lock your photos into cloud plans.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- shirakawasuna 6y ago
  NextCloud already offers photo sync and gallery functionality that you can self-host. 100% free and open source.

testesttest 6y ago

Looks like the server component is not open source? It doesn't look like it would be hard to write an open source backend. I use Dropbox and a second copy backend up to my personal server (via Dropbox cli) for photos. Owning that data is too important for me to use a random service accessable only via a phone app.

mtgx 6y ago

Some feedback on pricing: The 1GB free is nothing to write home about, and it's basically just a "free trial" kind of thing, at best. If they really wanted to hook users in, they should consider offering at least 5GB free. The jump from 1 GB free to 100GB for $30 a year is too large. I think they are missing a lot of people in-between. I have quite a lot of photos, but I don't think I'll need 100GB anytime soon. $30 a year for something like this when I could just use Google Photos for my purposes for free is still too much. So I suggest at least 1-2 other plans in between, such as 10GB for $5 a year and 20GB a year for $8 a year. Or if you do offer the 5GB for free, maybe just 15-20GB for $10 a year. I think you'd get a lot more "paying customers" this way, even if they aren't super profitable (they might just be, as the ones that need a ton of space are actually the ones that utilizes everything to the max, while normal people tend to overestimate how much they need). But once you get this larger audience hooked, it's easier to get them to upgrade when they need more.

dmje 6y ago

Looks nice. I spent ages trying to find a solution that does a nice mix of cross platform, own hard drive, cloud. I eventually found it in the shape of https://mylio.com/ https://mylio.com/ Along lines of other comments here, none of my other material has even like the same value as my family photos, so I'm stupendously careful with redundancy / multi location backup. In case anyone cares: local HDD attached to Mac, Synology on local network, folder on there synced to Dropbox and finally Synology C2. Too far I know, but it's worth it. Mylio is fast, clever (has a nice P2P model for in-network syncing), doesn't have to hit any cloud service if you don't want it to, good search, great management tools. I rate it highly.

sm4rk0 6y ago
Great, but client's not opensource...

iso8859-1 6y ago

Surprised that nobody is mentioning MediaMonkey. What are your experiences?

sneak 6y ago

> We are strong proponents of open source software and we believe that trust comes from transparency and openness, that’s why Stingle Photos is an open source software released under GPLv3 license. Everyone is free to review, audit, and contribute to the Stingle Photos codebase. Source code transparency is an absolute requirement for security and privacy oriented software solutions like Stingle Photos. Only the client software is Free Software, the server component has not been released, in source or object form. That sort of calls this whole paragraph into question.

enfotoad 6y ago

Adding my 2 cents on how I approach storing important family photos: 1. Minimize footprint. Keep only the photos that matter; this usually ends up being the ones with you or a loved one in the picture. I spent a weekend consolidating and reduced all my photos for the last 20 years down to 15GB. 2. Use 1 consumer-grade service like Google Photos for easy day-to-day access and sharing; just makes life easier for you and your loved ones to access memories on-demand. This can be substituted with any privacy-friendly alternative or young service like Stingle. 3. Use 1 business-grade storage solution for an off-site backup. Business-grade is critical b/c it enhances the relationship and SLA the provider gives you. I use AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive; it's free to upload, cheap to store ($0.00099/GB/month), and a bit pricey to retrieve ($0.09/GB for egress). This is my last-resort/lifeline if everything else goes wrong and I need to get my data again. To save on per-file upload fees, I zip up pictures by album or year and use 7Zip or Keka to encrypt the zip with a password using AES-256 for added privacy. Also remember, AWS is creating at least 3 copies of your data across 3 AZs in one region! 4. Keep a copy of the pictures at home on an NAS, hard drive, or better yet your computer if you have the space. I already use Time Machine to auto backup my entire Mac on an external drive so this gives me in total 2 copies of my pictures (one on laptop and one on time machine backup). In total this gives me 6 total copies of my pictures: - 1x Off-site Google Photos - 3x Off-site AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive - 1x On-site Laptop - 1x On-site Laptop's Time Machine Backup I'm not too concerned if one service provider loses my pics or revokes my access; plenty more copies! Please remember this only works if you religiously follow step 1. This will be an expensive and almost impractical setup if you enjoy holding onto 5TB+ worth of photos.

lucb1e 6y ago
Okay but how does this relate to the topic? Could you swap this product for the one you currently use for the second point, is that what you're saying? You seem to be advertising for a Google alternative in a thread about encrypted open source photo storage? I'm confused.

ylere 6y ago

Does any one know of a solution like this that also supports face detection and automatic scene/object recognition? That are the killer features that are currently keeping me at Google Photos but I really don't like the privacy implications of using it.

stiltzkin 6y ago

You are in time to add native support for Android TV, there is not even a native Google Photo app for Android TV and this could be a great addition. *Some people would suggest side load it but your app needs to be compatible with remote control and TV layout.

ChicagoDave 6y ago

I use NAS for my photos since I wouldn't trust any cloud even if the photos are encrypted. As for an organizer, nothing has replaced Picasa and it's a shame Google didn't open source it.

choward 6y ago
Why wouldn't you trust it if you encrypted them yourself? Are you afraid they'll break the encryption, lose the data, or collect other data such as when you upload?
- ChicagoDave 6y ago
  I have an unhealthy mistrust of online storage, especially with something as personal as photographs. I started taking digital photos in 2000 and have digital video as well.

OneLeggedCat 6y ago

Open-source, but Android or iPhone only?

rswail 6y ago

I have a Mac and I have Office 365 with its free 1TB storage. My photo library location is on OneDrive and my phone stream is synced to the Mac. My Mac is also backed up to NAS. So my pics are in two different physical locations and one offsite. I guess I should have an external drive that I make regular backups to and then take offsite somewhere as well.

el_don_almighty 6y ago

I want Picasa + Web Gallery I miss the excellent facial tagging that Picasa offered and none of these solutions offers any facial tags.

m-p-3 6y ago

Sadly the mobile app I use (Cryptomator) isn't open source but the encryption system used is, and it allows doing an automatic backup to an encrypted volume that can be synced in the cloud.