That’s my next project to get things from Google/Apple.
The options I’ve seen so far
- Immich: great if you can self-host, but I prefer not to, so that’s out for me
- Nextcloud on a VPS (Hetzner or others): you need E2EE to prevent the providers from seeing your photos, but then all the apps like Memories etc don’t work ( https://help.nextcloud.com/t/end-to-end-encryption-nextcloud/237705/3 )
- Ente: has E2EE embedded, the face recognition happens on the clients. Can be self-hostable, so that gives more trust that other providers can launch their own European instances in the future.
- https://zeitkapsl.eu/en/ : has E2EE, but no self hostable option, so you kind of have to trust them that they implement their design (which is actually kind of nice: https://zeitkapsl.eu/en/e2ee-architecture/ . They have a security audit on their roadmap (announced 8 days ago: https://zeitkapsl.featurebase.app/en/p/formal-security-audit )
Any option I am missing?
https://ente.io/ is a paid service, not expensive, E2E encrypted, and maybe open-source.
Edit: sorry, you already mentioned it without the URL.
Yes I’m using Ente at the moment, ideally I would prefer to use a European provider (they would basically self host the Ente software with a fee for users), but at the moment there aren’t any that I know of.
I went through this dilemma too and actually talked with ente about it. It turns out that they did initially try to set it up in Europe as they are a global team, but the EU requirement for physical presence in the country was limiting for them.
They said that there were workarounds for this but decided on setting it up in the US because it was very straightforward with no workarounds or limitations
I like the way they are going with ente though and feel like it’s a fair price. The software works well too
Interesting, thank you