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Your homepage says "protect your photos/faces etc. from algorithms" The algorithms are what makes Google Photos; Google Photos. If I wanted to just store my ph
by benbristow 5y ago
Your homepage says "protect your photos/faces etc. from algorithms"
The algorithms are what makes Google Photos; Google Photos. If I wanted to just store my photos I'd throw them in a S3 bucket or Dropbox or something.
Google Photos lets me automatically categorise my photos by person, lets me search my library using text search for anything (e.g. I can search 'museum' and see pictures I've taken in museums). That is where the real value of Google Photos comes into play.
> But we are far from where we want to be in terms of features (object and face detection, location clustering, image filters, ...) and user experience. We are hoping to use this post as an opportunity to collect feedback from fellow hackers.
So you're going to implement algorithms then?
- LightG 5y agoYou're willing to pay the price of those algorithms and the Google ecosystem. Others are not. I'm excited to review this project. Thanks to the creators. This has come at a perfect moment ... as, this weekend, I'm literally downloading my entire Google photos archive (one year at a time) to my local harddrive and figuring out a way forward. I'm done with Google after a 'straw breaking the camels back' moment with their payment system.
- alisonkisk 5y agoWhy not use Takeout to download all at once?
- gizdan 5y agoOn top of this, good algorithms should be run if it is possible to do it in a privacy friendly way.
- Aspos 5y agoThose "algorithms" can run locally, on a NAS or a desktop, generate the metadata and make it available to you only on your mobile. I can see myself paying for such software if it was mature enough.
- izacus 5y agoSynology Photos is one such solution already for example.
- Aspos 5y agoI have Synology, actually. Is Synology Photos trustable?
- chias 5y agoThe software with these features is called Synology Moments. I use it and I mostly love it, at the very least as a backup for my Google Photos. My experience is that it works great, provided that you're on your local network. When away from home or traveling, less so. Maybe I could configure things better to alleviate that, I don't know, but I haven't managed to yet. Sharing is less convenient. Trying to share a photo on-platform is a terrible experience for the receiver with multiple slow redirects, so much so that generally if you're on mobile it's easier/better to just download the photo to your device and share the photo directly. The Moments android app has a flow for doing this, which is nice. It also makes a certain amount of sense: the alternative would be others connecting to your NAS online, which is always going to be less nice than just connecting to Google photos. The search capabilities are pretty decent. It can recognize people and tag them appropriately. It can recognize some things. In some ways, I prefer searching it over searching Google Photos. But again, only if you're on your local network with your NAS. -- Edit: see aborsy's response to me below. Looks like I'm a version behind. Maybe on-platform photo sharing is better now, I'll update the software and check it out
- vishnumohandas 5y ago> So you're going to implement algorithms then? Yes, we will implement the algorithms, purely on the client side, such that we don't hold indexes to your personal data. But I understand how that piece of text could have thrown you off, I'll think of ways to rephrase it. Thanks for pointing it out.
- natch 5y agoYou can run algorithms locally and still violate privacy by uploading private facts derived from the data with algorithms. Saying you won’t hold “indexes” doesn’t begin to cover it.
- godelski 5y agoActually I'm really curious how you do this. If the photos aren't stored client side, then how do you search? Do you have a thumbnail of every photo client side? Is that enough? I mean ImageNet scores are still pretty low for small/fast neural nets. And ImageNet isn't even representative of real world photos. So obviously to be successful you're going to have to continue training. So how do you do this in a privacy preserving way? Even federated learning can have some issues because images can be reconstructed from gradients.
- vishnumohandas 5y ago> Do you have a thumbnail of every photo client side In the happy path the files/thumbnails are indexed before they are uploaded. But we are designing a framework that will pull files/thumbnails for indexing if they are unindexed or indexed by older models. > how do you do this in a privacy preserving way Our accuracy will not match that offered by services who index your data on their servers. But there's a trade off between user experience and privacy here, and we are hopeful that ente will be a viable option for an audience who is willing to sacrifice a bit of one for a lot of the other.
- tomxor 5y agoWe need to make this stuff local again, that will be the real competitor to big corp Foo... no servers, no end-to-end, no service cost, no ads, no privacy issues, no random revokation of accounts without recourse, just one end - the users. We can have face detection etc locally if people want it... cycles, it's going to happen eventually.
- alisonkisk 5y agowe had that, but almost everyone decided they like the cloud better.
- sillysaurusx 5y agoAm I the only one who never realized you can search "museum" and see your museum photos? Now that you've mentioned it, yes, I'd like to try that. But as a counterpoint to your argument, I've never needed it, and I suspect that a lot of people may not actually be getting the same value propositions that you're getting. On the other hand, Google Photos is Google Photos. But it's often a mistake to compete directly with an established product. New ideas tend to win by transcending the competition. I propose that if this Show HN turns into a product, it will be because it does something people didn't realize they wanted. Maybe that's privacy. I don't know.
- hawaiianbrah 5y agoThe search is really quite fun to play with, and very useful! I also like searching on the map and seeing where I’ve taken photos. Especially if I’m looking for one particular photo, it’s fun to zoom in from the world map
- sillysaurusx 5y agoThanks for pointing that out. I actually had the opportunity to sync my iPhone photos to Google Photos, but opted to decline. This made me reconsider; cheers.
- Jcowell 5y agoWhy would this feature , that is also apart of Photos, make you reconsider ?
- sillysaurusx 5y agoAs much as I like apple / iCloud / my iPhone, I do like the idea of seeing all the places on a map that I’ve traveled with my lovely wife Emily. We’re hoping to go to the Seychelles if the next three months work out at my contract gig. I like the idea of being able to type “water” and see a bunch of water bottles mixed in with all the water-y places we’ve visited. What sealed the deal was to see it on a map. I typed “water” into Photos just now, and it did a pretty good job. But there’s something peculiar about being able to look at a pin and say “I’ve been at that pin.” Just a silly thing. But it costs me nothing to get it, so I want it.
- mfer 5y agoTo think that someone can just throw their photos in s3 assumes people are ops, devils, or devs. That’s a small slice of the population. What about everyone else?
- benbristow 5y agoI also mention Dropbox. I haven't used it for a while though
- joelbondurant 5y agoYou're right, a few hours of work on top of S3 are needed to obviate Google Photos.
- barbazoo 5y ago> If I wanted to just store my photos I'd throw them in a S3 bucket or Dropbox or something. Neither of those give you any privacy unless you do the encryption yourself in which case you have to build something to access them unencrypted. Have you checked out what the service actually does?
- ipaddr 5y agoWouldn't a mega encripted folder make sense for the average person?
- barbazoo 5y agoLet's say you store your photos in Dropbox but inside an encrypted folder. What would you have to do to view the photos? Unless there client you encrypt your files with has a photo viewer, you'd have to download the pictures and decrypt them to look at them. The whole thing becomes very inconvenient very quickly.
- ipaddr 5y agohttps://mega.io/ https://mega.io/ is client side. It works like protonmail you decript to view.
- peakaboo 5y agoI don't want Google at all in my life, so I think this product seems very attractive. But of course it depends on the user, what they value.
- bshoemaker 5y agoI want none of those features. I want automatic backup, easy sharing, and accessibility from all devices.
- bsanr2 5y ago>lets me search my library using text search for anything This is untrue, and actually one of the reasons I hope a strong competitor to Google Photos comes along soon. The search function is, for whatever reason, heavily censored and perhaps even biased in some circumstances. Worse, it is completely useless. For example, the query "fat" returns nothing, despite the fact that my gallery is filled with drawing reference photos that includes plus-sized people. "Black people" returns photos of non-black people, and (infamously, and perhaps for related reasons re: the shortcomings of Google's image recognition and tagging algorithm) "gorilla" returns 0 results. "Red shirt" returns an image of a blue decorative screen; "comic" returns anime and webpage screenshots; "woman" returns multiple photos consisting entirely of groups of men. The situation is dire.
- benbristow 5y agoThink of it from Google's POV. Imagine if the tabloids found out about a situation of someone searching for 'fat' in the search bar and then it coming back with pictures of themselves or their friends - that could cause some serious controversy.
- bsanr2 5y agoWell, this gets to the heart of one of the issues with the current approach to AI. Statistical consensus doesn't always align with a user's personal view or desires. I don't know how you solve the problem; my issue is that Google doesn't seem to know, either, but they insist that they do.
- tssva 5y agoBesides search another feature of Google Photos that I would need is automatically inclusion of photos in shared albums based upon who is in them. Some examples: I have an album shared with my parents which photos of my daughter are automatically added to. I have an album shared with my daughter which photos of our dog is automatically added to. I also like the collages, slideshows, movies and this day x years ago photos which Google Photos automatically creates and notifies me of.
- scandox 5y agoPersonally I'd find the pure storage and basic categories suitable. I dislike almost all the algorithms. Especially "memories" and shit like that. Simple and reliable backup and reasonably speedy browsing is what I need.
- leppr 5y agoFor me the features that make Google photo, Google photo are: * it's free and comes by default with an Android phone. * it just works. If you can make an effortless way to get online backups of my photos at a reasonable price while regaining privacy, then I'll switch in a heartbeat without a single thought about any of those ML-based moat features Google has crammed in their service.
- OneEyedRobot 5y ago>So you're going to implement algorithms then? Jeesh, that's easy. You encrypt the algorithms too.