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?
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.
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
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…
I know you said you can’t do your local box, but there’s no necessity for a static IP to do that. Dynamic DNS is relatively easy to set up, I suppose provided you have a domain name you own (which you can find for very reasonable prices).
Dynamic DNS only works if your IP is publicly routable. My ISP (not sure about OP) puts us behind NAT, so the only way to expose services on my network is through a tunnel, like a VPN.
But many ISPs do provide a routable IP. My last ISP did, so it’s not uncommon.
And you don’t necessarily need to own an IP, services like FreeDNS let you use a subdomain from someone else, but a domain can be as little as $1/year (for TLDs like .site and .store), so it’s probably better to just get one. I have like 10 domains, and they only cost $10/year each or so. But if you just want to try out hosting something, using someone else’s isn’t a bad way to go.
Or setup Tailscale and enable the Funnel feature for whatever service you want to expose.
This way it’s a bit more secure, since the exposed endpoint is hosted by Tailscale and routed to your device via your Tailscale (encrypted) network.
Using Funnel, no one needs to have the Tailscale client.
Immich if you selfhost
Does it support SSO with OIDC?
Yes, have it running right now!
This is the way, immich is insanely fast and performant
Have pictures printed and mail them. Use a family text thread.
If you aren’t gonna host your own digital files and you don’t want someone else to get their hands on em those are the options.
I don’t mind self-hosting, I just need something that can host from a dynamic IP since static is too expensive right now.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Store them in an s3 bucket or put them in a gh-pages repo.
Any way to get a gallery browse and light box viewer?
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 🙌
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
Maybe don’t share online?
We have a printing center in my area that prints high quality full color photos for 75 cents a page.
Photo development booths, printing centres and later phone repair shops (before phones regularly got encrypted) used to be the number one avenue for getting photos leaked.
As true as that is, we’re talking about photos of a newborn infant. Like for real, who would intentionally leak photos of a newborn?
Oh yeah, that’s right, artificial intelligence!
Don’t feed the online machine, take the photos into a print shop via USB flash drive, and I’m pretty sure anyone with a soul will have respect for family privacy.
Not so with online cloud services though ☹️