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?
To be honest, personally I would even go a step further and just print the valuable photos, add them to a physical album and call it a day.
But my mother and sisters complain their Google Photos storage is full. I disabled the synchronization recently, but now they are afraid they’ll lose their pictures if their phone dies.
Maybe a bit nuclear and more fun to think of than actually doing it but…: You could plant the fear that Google will just delete the pictures if trump or someone else decides he doesn’t like one of these fotos and then help them transition to a local storage.
My dad, my brother and I all made sure ASAP that our mother (wife in my dad’s case, absolutely a lost cause with anything internet because she never was interested in it outside of cat videos) thinks everything cloud is bad and just stealing her things and editing fotos to be nudes.
As I said, I disabled the Google Photos synchronization already.
Now I’m looking for a backup alternative.
I did second “local storage” in my post. Only truly safe place for fotos imo because you actually have full control over it.
You might have to add a PC in between but once that’s done and connected (which really isn’t complicated, apps like My Phone Explorer can help) it’s really only a matter of pulling the foto folder from the phone to the HDD and that’s really easy to do.