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?
I’m selfhosting Immich on Hetzner with a Storagebox for… well… storage. Immich is great for my use case, but ideally someone else would manage the server for me. I am testing out pixelunion.eu which is hosted Immich by a Dutch company (apparently with data centers in Falkenstein and Finland so potentially using Hetzner). So far it seems like a solid offering. My main worry is that the company is quite new.
I had a look at Pixelunion too, looks nice but I would prefer E2EE.
If they hosted Ente I would go with them instantly.
I tried Ente as well, but could never really get along with the UI for some reason. There is something about the way they handle groupings and the differences in features across web, desktop, and app. My internal debate about if I trust pixelunion to not access my pictures vs E2EE is still ongoing…