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?
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.
Could set up a nextcloud instance, but might be a bit overkill for your use case as it is a full Google workspace replacement
Look into Pixelfed.
Synology + Docker + Pixelfed is doable
If you want to keep the metadata on the photos, well GG since it and the color profiles will all be stripped
Seafile?
This could be a good option. I will have to look into it. I know some of our family is not the most savvy (lucky to be able to use FB) so I may have to look into building a front end on top of it for them, but this is a solid start.
Good luck mate…
Haven’t tried it myself but https://ente.io/ seems to be pretty decent
Been a customer for half a year here now and it is such a good service! Easily worth the cost. Highly recommend checking out there website to go through their feature set, their level of transparency is beyond good 🙌
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.
I haven’t found something with a nice simple UI, let us know how you go
You could use Pixelfed if you trust the server admin (many choices), it’s FOSS and based on ActivityPub to share with other Fediverse applications. You could even self-host it.
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 know Futo has an app called Circles which is designed for things like that and staying in contact with family without social media. It’s supposedly E2EE and controlled by the person hosting the circle.
I haven’t used it yet for myself so I can’t say whether it’s good or not, but it sounds like something you might be interested in.
Congrats on the newborn, by the way!
Thank you on the congrats! We are so happy and he could not be more adorable.
Also thank you for the suggestion, I will dig into it.
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
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.
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.
Best guess would be a privacy focused chat app like Signal or Matrix.
Otherwise you may want to look at crypto bases file storage ala Filecoin or potentially even Pixelfed
To send them directly to someone perhaps but it looks like OP wants to store them
