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Ask HN: What are you using to replace shared iCloud Photos albums?
Please recommend a boomer friendly photo sharing service that is also privacy conscious…if such thing even exists.
Looking for easier/better alternatives than doing Nextcloud, ownCloud, etc.
- tekkertje 5y agoYogile[0] has been built with shared albums in mind and doesn't touch your photos other than for rescaling. [0] https://yogile.com https://yogile.com
- darkwizard42 5y agoHave always used Google Photos. Haven't had any issues and its easy to get others to understand. I realize this does not meet your criteria of privacy conscious but does meet boomer friendly. Sorry
- tsjq 5y agoGoogle Photos has started metering the usage. only 16GB free. will fillup in a year, for most of us with recent phones and camera-autosync-to-GP enabled.
- brundolf 5y agoDropbox does automatic photo backups on Android and iOS. It also allows you to share files and folders, though I'm not sure how it compares to Apple Photos for "boomers"
- robertoandred 5y agoDropbox checks for CSAM too.
- TimTheTinker 5y agoChecking for CSAM isn't the issue. The issue is that Apple's system design easily extends to checking all sorts of other things - political dissidents, journalists, etc. Not only that, it commits a felony when it transmits found CSAM to a party other than NCMEC (i.e. Apple itself).
- shuckles 5y agoScanning all your photos in the cloud easily extends to checking all sorts of other things as well.
- euphoria83 5y agoIt does. However people have a greater expectation of privacy on a device they own than on a cloud-based solution where they have voluntarily uploaded content.
- shuckles 5y agoGood thing the device only does this as part of voluntarily uploading the photo to a cloud based solution.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mvanbaak 5y agoThe scanning only takes place if you enable icloud libraries. Your phone and photos app ask for this and you have to accept it before it is enabled. Sounds voluntarily to me.
- robertoandred 5y agoApple’s system design does not easily extend to checking vague subject matter. Every step of the process is tied to hashes of specific photographs. And do you seriously think they didn’t check the legality of what they built? Really?
- mrathys 5y agoThat is not correct. They are algorithms that detect photos that resemble specific photographs.
- kureikain 5y agoI used google photo/google drive.
- yablak 5y agoGoogle photos
- ytch 5y agoGoogle photos scans and report to police for photos in CSAM too.
- max_ 5y agoI have always used Mega[0]. It's real end to end encryption. I would argue it also has a superior user experience across all the others. [0] https://mega.nz/ https://mega.nz/
- ComodoHacker 5y agoBy the way, do they scan for CSAM?
- max_ 5y agoThey couldn't even if they wanted. Due to the encryption
- ComodoHacker 5y agoThey could on device.
- egberts 5y agoexcept if the key to its encrypted-at-rest hard drive is not used to do encrypting/decrypting on same CPU as it’s hard drive (that being, done remotely)
- _009 5y agoI remember meeting with KimDotCom lawyer a few years ago in SF. A very flamboyant-person. One of those guys who makes a big impression on you from the first sight. While KimDotCom is an impressive hacker, I am not sure that I would love to be the target of the FEDs around the world as he is still in the eye of the US. Fun story about MegaUpload. I once lived in Argentina back in the MegaUpload days. At the time, piracy was the norm (not only in Argentina), the gov didn't care, and people where selling pirated, burned DVD on the streets. This was a downtown, a high transited area. Then MegaUpload started to grow like fire, and I remember that starting at 4 pm, the internet would get awfully slow. As people get off their jobs to download the latest movie or episode out there. Then PopcornTime, and things got even worst. Cant find the stat, but I remember something along the line of 60% of Buenos Aires traffic being MegaUpload's at peak time (4-10pm), which caused a lot of controversy at the time. Old days...
- shuckles 5y agoYou want an end to end encrypted cloud provider like ProtonDrive or Sync.com. You can also consider using rclone or Cryptomator to encrypt data before adding it to a consumer cloud sync solution. All come with the usual caveats (do you really trust Sync.com to withstand a state actor?) and user experience compromises.
- jcun4128 5y agoIs there noticeable performance difference/loss of functionality? I did some encrypted text stuff before at rest and remembered to do a basic SQL select you have to decrypt everything (say column) first and then be able to search into it. So there is an added overhead... Maybe it doesn't matter with cloud processing or something.
- fraXis 5y agoSync.com also has zero knowledge end to end encryption: https://www.sync.com/pdf/sync-privacy-whitepaper.pdf https://www.sync.com/pdf/sync-privacy-whitepaper.pdf
- windthrown 5y agoI similarly use Tresorit (https://tresorit.com/ https://tresorit.com/) and share photo albums but these are general cloud storage as opposed to being optimized for viewing photos in a browser.
- anonuser123456 5y agoiCloud photos is pretty good. I’d say it has a good balance between security and privacy. Probably best in class.
- shuckles 5y agoSecurity and privacy usually don’t need to be balanced; they build on each other. Security and privacy versus usability, sure.
- simion314 5y agoApple implemented a system where they sent to their server on an insecure protocol information that identified what applications you are opening. This shows everyone how much Apple cares or is capable of implementing privacy. Emails reveal during the Apple vs Epic trial revealed that Apple store apps were infected, then Apple prepared an email for the users to inform them but Timmy decided that informing the users about possible security or privacy problems is bad for PR. We need to keep reminding or informing people about the reality and not the myth of Apple. Yes I know you use Apple because Google shit is probably worse but Apple shit is still shit, Apple hypocrisy is still hypocrisy and Apple greed is still greed.
- edoceo 5y agoI've got my family putting photos into a little web-app I made (a few PHP scripts) and it's long-term storage backed in rsync.net. My "boomer" group have Google devices, so once they auth to my service I can pull their photo albums for import.
- holsta 5y agoI have been using (the open source) Syncthing for both personal things and business for many years. You don't need to set up a central server, just share folders via other clients. If you do, however, set up a server, you can centralize your data and easily run all the backup jobs from it.
- ssss11 5y agoI’ve got a synology NAS that comes with a photos app that’s easy to use.
- jamesholden 5y agoThis was on Ars Technica really recently. I have not used it myself yet: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/foss-mobile-app-stingle-wants-to-privately-securely-back-up-your-photos/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/foss-mobile-app-stin...
- jamesholden 5y agoThey also reference some further alternatives from another article recently, which I also thought had some interesting options: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/the-big-alternatives-to-google-photos-showdown/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/the-big-alternatives...
- usrme 5y agoI gave Stingle a cursory try, but I was immediately put off by the fact that it was not even able to retrieve EXIF data from images and use that a basis for sorting. The handful of images I uploaded as a test we're all dated to the date I uploaded them as opposed to when they were actually taken, and there was no way to change that either. There was also no way to view the EXIF data as well.
- wodenokoto 5y agoIs it the phone or only iCloud that scans for CSAM?
- fretn 5y agoThe phone, but only when you have iCloud photos enabled and only when you live in the US
- DavideNL 5y ago...for now
- dotancohen 5y agoI get that CSAM is real and is hurtful. So are many other things: slavery, murder, etc etc. But is the real-world instance of CSAM so high that every photo on every phone that is shared with another human needs to be scanned for it? It seems like there is no tradeoff too big to not be taken in the quest to eradicate CSAM. Are the resources spent really proportional to the threat?
- e12e 5y agoI have not found a good option yet, but next on my list is: https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism Doesn't look like it's available as a paid service, unfortunately.
- reacharavindh 5y agoI am also eagerly waiting for Photoprism to hit stability and add people recognition to mostly move away from iCloud. They have an issue that is being worked on since 2018 to add support for people recognition :-) Hopefully soon!!
- thedanbob 5y agoI’ve been self-hosting this for a few months, it’s really good. I was disappointed at first when I realized it didn’t have native apps, so uploading new photos was a sub-par experience. But then I found the app PhotoSync which has Photoprism integration. Would be nice to have it all in one but I’m happy.
- TroisM 5y agoI would be classified as a pedo if my pictures were on iCloud... even if some of the naked kid is me... I also have pictures of my kids playing in the bath.
- samrolken 5y agoFortunately that’s not how it works. You would have to have a whole collection of known and identified CSAM to be classified as anything at all with the system Apple has announced.
- throwawayay02 5y agoNo, their AI accepts some deviation. And we don't know how many false positives it takes to start a human review. And for privacy of course different people will evaluate different photos. And a human without context will flag a picture of a kid on the bath as child pornography. It is a very real possibility OP is made a suspect because of this.
- samrolken 5y agoEven if we accept that your image of your kids in the bath will match the hash of a known and identified CSAM picture (a real stretch), under this system the voucher payload does not contain the private key to decrypt the picture, so nobody will be able to evaluate a photo or flag it as anything. Humans have access to a “visual derivative” based on the perceptual mechanism used to create the hash, but not to the actual photo. Other companies have CSAM scanning and reporting with much fewer safeguards and the “my kid in the bathtub” scenario hasn’t seemed to actually be a problem.
- robertoandred 5y agoThe deviation it accepts are about crops, rotations, resizing, etc. It's not "gee, this bridge looks orange, so I'll just say it's the Golden Gate."
- Spooky23 5y agoHonestly, this issue has been a thing for a few days now. How about spending like 10m reading actual information about how this works, instead of perpetuating ignorance? This tech is not new.
- dmje 5y agoI like Mylio[0] - it's local only but syncs p2p style across local network. Or obviously you can sync folders with Whatever Online Service you choose, Mega or whatever. https://mylio.com https://mylio.com
- tuananh 5y agoNothing come close to icloud photos for me. Because everyone else is using iphone which make icloud shared photo album the easiest way for old people to interact.
- x4j91 5y agoSync.com
- hex-m 5y agoYou don't have to "do" Nextcloud yourself if you don't want to. Find a hoster[0] that does the work for you. The client apps and the user interface are super boomer friendly. [0] https://nextcloud.com/partners/ https://nextcloud.com/partners/
- lazzurs 5y agoI use Nextcloud and it works great. I do self host and with Docker don't find it all that hard with minimal maintenance. The iOS client is excellent but to be totally transparent sometimes the app does need to be opened to make sure the photo sync happens.
- istingray 5y agoThanks for the link - I signed up for a free 2 GB Nextcloud with one of their partners. Experimenting with non-iCloud hosted notes now. It's a bumpy ride, lots of room for improvement.
- tetek 5y agojust siasky.net or https://skygallery.hns.siasky.net/#/ https://skygallery.hns.siasky.net/#/
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y agoPersonally I don't trust anything that I don't self-host. With Hetzner I chose full-metal instead of VPS. I pay €40 for 4 TB (2x4 TB mirrored to be precise) shared among a large number of services, including Minecraft servers for kids. The load is very low and the maintenance is a pleasure. Plus I love tinkering with and learning new things, so this part of mine is fully satisfied. I learned with Hetzner that every 3 years or so a hard drive dies but they replace it within half an hour so I just let the RAID rebuild itself and that's all.
- technics256 5y agoWas looking to do the same. What software do you use to replace things like dropbox/photos etc?
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y agoPreviously I was using various projects for these things like Coquelicot as a WeTransfer alternative but practically speaking Nextcloud is so easy to use (and relatively stable now) that I use it for most things that need to be shared with others: * it's intuitive to use, so people who haven't seen it can quickly download what you send them without having to log in, being tracked and so on. * password protection and expiry date for shared links come in handy * superfast search is a boon for me as I have so many files it's probably the most important aspect * the photos app in Next/ownCloud is underperforming if you have a large number of photos in a folder - the thumbnails seem to be generated each time I open the folder, it's probably a bug. * when you need to collaborate, it's supereasy to add users and they intuitively know how to do things as they're used to Dropbox etc.
- whalesalad 5y agoHetzner is cool unless you are in the US. Latency sucks across the Atlantic.
- leesalminen 5y agoDepends on what you’re using it for. I set up a Matrix homeserver on a hetzner box in Finland for primarily North American users. Latency hasn’t been a perceptible problem for that.
- alexfromapex 5y agoSynology NAS
- wilsonfiifi 5y agoYep. More precisely Moments [0] which is great for photos and videos. But the Synology app ecosystem as a whole isn't bad at all. Just remember to buy a NAS with an x86 processor so you can also take advantage of docker based apps. I believe the DS220+ is a good device to start with if your budget is around $300. [0] https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/feature/moments https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/feature/moments
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- estevaovix 5y agopcloud.com
- mithusingh32 5y agoNextCloud that runs in my own personal server. Been running it for a few months and I have 0 issues with it. It may not have the same integration options but it's better than the alternatives.
- Jeremy1026 5y agoNothing, I'll be continuing to use iCloud Photos.
- jdgoesmarching 5y agoI will too if we ever get an option for full res shared albums. Such a glaring feature hole atm.
- mey 5y agoArsTechnica did a run down of various options recently. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/the-big-alternatives-to-google-photos-showdown/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/the-big-alternatives...
- aborsy 5y agoWhat would be the problem with the old school back up with 3 encrypted USB drives or small SSDs? One at home, one at office and one on key chain. Cheap, secure, highly available and offline.
- diggernet 5y agoSmugMug.com
- sircastor 5y agoI’ve been looking strongly at Plex’s photo support. The images are self hosted, but the service acts like a DDNS, so you can easily get to it. I run our current Plex system off of our NAS, but have been thinking about moving it to a dedicated RasPi.
- replwoacause 5y agoInfomaniac kDrive