For most people, self hosting their own data isn’t even an option. For the subset of privacy concerned people who have the technological knowledge to self host, making mistakes with their data is not “orders of magnitude less likely”.
I'm trying hard to invalidate this with PhotoStructure. My goal is to be installable and usable by even my least-computer-savvy family members.
Although there are desktop installers, users can move their library to a NAS, rPI, oDroid, NUC or a VM in the cloud--anything that can host 64-bit docker images--but only if they want to. Everything in your library works cross-platform because I didn't want to be tied down to any OS or hardware.
PS: There's an image that can't be loaded on the confirmation page when registering for email updates.
PhotoStructure imports files that are available to the device that it runs on: local files and anything mounted via a network filesystem (like AFS, NFS, or SMB/CIFS).
I use SyncThing or Resilio Sync to send my phone's photos and videos to my NAS. When I'm on vacation with limited bandwidth, I add a sync node on my laptop (which is connected to the hotel WiFi), so my phone syncs quickly to my laptop next to me, and then through the course of the day, the laptop syncs back home.
Although it's certainly more convenient to have everything wrapped into one app, I think there's an appeal to being able to choose the tool that works for you. (In other words: it's much less code I have to write and maintain--writing battery-efficient, stable background jobs on both iOS and Android are a PITA!)
> There's an image that can't be loaded on the confirmation page
Are you using ublock origin or a pihole? Those block most images coming from mailchimp.
I'm currently running both syncthing and Google Photos to store my photos. syncthing is great once it works, but it is definitely not something I would expect a family member to be able to set up.
In any case I'm very much looking forward to see where PhotoStructure is going. I've set up a reminder to give it a try.
I'll be sending out instructions to my next wave of beta users soon.