Open-source photo gallery with cloud backup and end-to-end encryption
stingle.org
stingle.org
I use Apple's iCloud with a 2TB plan as my primary. I back it up with Google One's 2TB family plan where we have a common family photos (wife, and I)and my 11-year old daughter learning to shoot. The Google Photos is more because Apple has no correct implementation of sharing/collaborating between the family members.
- Stingle is costlier than Apple or Google's plan.
- It does not say anywhere that this is open source and I can host it myself, plugged in with a storage such as AWS S3 or Wasabi or any other cloud that I can backup/store etc.
So far, NextCloud[1] seems to be the best bet with PhotoSync[2] keeping a local/cloud backup. I need the ability to share photos with an expansive network of families/relatives on different platforms such as Android, Windows, Mac, Linux.
I haven't found any other services and am beginning to believe I have a weird and different needs than most.
It doesn't, which sucks. I was hoping for the exact same thing. It only says that the client is open source, so you can verify that your photos are actually encrypted.
Ask yourself why would an open-source tool provide "cloud storage"? To bring more customers to the respective cloud provider? It's also not particularly altruistic in a FOSS sense to lock your photos into cloud plans.
You have to scroll a bit further down to see “End-to-end encrypted data” on the page you linked :)
Sure, techies tend to be more paranoid than the average person, but I do think people undervalue the long tail of data. Years ago I was talking to my wife about avoiding sensitive info in email with our tax preparer. I mentioned that we could send an email and a decade later he could get compromised and it would be trivial to scan old emails for specific data like w2s, social security numbers, or bank accounts.
Unfortunately not open source, but it is what it is.
PhotoStructure is especially applicable if you want a cross-platform solution (mac, windows, linux, docker), and don't want to be tied to a specific NAS or cloud vendor[1].
Every time you open the home page you see something new, as PhotoStructure picks out random "samples" by year, or by camera, or by keyword. It's fun to see photos you haven't seen in a while!
I like to use iCloud primarily, but I'm looking for a solution to sync the collection to take an offline regular versioned backup. So far all the options I've tried kept all photos, including the deleted ones, and duplicate the modified ones.
If you delete something from the Adobe cloud, is it deleted from your backups too?
What do you use for sharing albums with friends?
What do you use for displaying photos on a TV?
I use iCloud photos for sharing with friends and family.
This is just about choosing a cloud storage provider that I can feel reasonably confident will still have my photos backed up on any given day for the foreseeable future.
I think you can make much better choices than FAANG or a random company, and I advise anyone to go with that better choice.
It’s only good for backups though. There’s no way to browse/share memories so we reluctantly still also use Amazon photos...
1. It’s still a kind of vendor lock-in that I’m not crazy about
2. I’m generally underwhelmed by the synology apps (eg music) and prefer docker based foss alternatives when available
3. I was reading somewhere about DS moments (after another mention on this post) and I think they require a special folder structure?
2. Yeah, I only use DS Photo for backup / browsing on my phone. And Drive to replace Dropbox.
3. Not entirely sure about DS moments, as i use Photostation. In there it's basically each folder is an album (or sub/album).
(Source: my personal experience with Google Pixel "original quality" backups, and providing customer support to several hundred PhotoStructure beta testers).
It comes with an adapter for Google Photos, so you can use it to download / backup photos and videos in your library.
Note: there are some limitations to this approach – namely that rclone won't be able to download your original image files, even if you uploaded with 'original' quality. These limitations are documented on the rclone website: https://rclone.org/googlephotos/
I have it run via a cron job and backup files to a local folder.
I also use this to backup my gmail account: https://github.com/jay0lee/got-your-back
I store these on a local OpenSuse box I use as a NAS. It has a local drive, with a 2nd drive that is mounted and synced to weekly. Then the important stuff is rsynced offsite to a cloud server, rsync for pictures and other various "family" stuff. Borg for home drives with more private information.
That internal drive I backup to, runs btrfs. After backup is complete. I take a snapshot and keep a monthly one going back at least a year.
Does not really seem fit for purpose. I'll be looking into it if I can update it.
From there RClone encrypts and copies them to AWS Glacier Deep Archive (11 9s, etc). I'll also start coping them to Google Workspace (was GSuite).
This removes a lot of product change risks such as Google APIs not returning the original files, etc. AWS Glacier is secure and cheap unless I have to restore. If I'm doing a full restore it's likely that's the cheapest option so then I don't care.
Glacier Deep Archive works out to about $1/TB/month and because it's paid per GB it removes the risks of a company changing plans or some "unlimited but not really" problem.
One piece of advice, think about your local disaster risks. I'm in an earthquake risk area. I ruled out most off-site backup options that involved moving drives around due to those all being in my same disaster area and costs of bank boxes etc.
Is iCloud better for this?
As Google Photos is my main usecase for being stuck in the Google Ecosystem, is this situation better with the iCloud?
I also remember when I left Facebook and asked for an archive of my photos, I got 800x600 images when I had uploaded much higher resolution ones. Service degradation is actually more common in FAANG because they have a massive moat and rely on the fact that 90% of their customers don't know their 1's from their 0's.
I compared checksums of (recently uploaded)
1) original source images
2) result of clicking "Download" in the Web UI
3) what was contained in my most recent Takeout
And they all match. There might be issues with the API (didn't check), but that API is VERY limited anyway.
Someone recommended the github project called Timeliner to help me get the photos though. I just haven’t tried it yet.
This is because of a change they made.
I was absolutely distraught tbh. The feeling of being at the mercy of google is a horrible feeling. Especially when there is zero support or assistance.
I received links to over 100 tgz files (4GB each), and checked a couple. Each had JPG files and JSON files with extra metadata ("geoDataExif", "geoData" (inferred from my location history?), "title", "description", etc).
I can't tell if the actual images are the originals I uploaded, but I can confirm the images were archived as actual images, and in a serviceable format/structure.
https://github.com/mholt/timeliner
Timeliner is a personal data aggregation utility.
It collects all your digital things from pretty much
anywhere and stores them on your own computer, indexes
them, and projects them onto a single, unified timeline.
Supported data sources
* Google Location History
* Google PhotosHowever, it has tons of metadata files, empty folders, etc. I highly suggest unticking 'preserve directory structure' when unpacking.
Now, when I was just browsing the zips, it was folder after folder of junk I didn't even recognize, I guess metadata files of some sort. Rather than do all that, at least in Gnome, when I unzip it has an option of 'preserve directory structure' that I unchecked, which basically gets rid of all the folders. From there I was easily able to mass remove all the json and other non-photo files, leaving only the photos behind. Good luck.
It's not just about third-party storage - I have a picture of my great-grandmother and her parents from 1898 when she was 3 in my photo album. It survived several wars, regimes, and revolutions. No current digital tech in general can provide this kind of longevity, you have to actively watch the media yourself and transfer it when it's about to expire. (which I also do for the rest, of course)
Your house burns down, now what?
> I have a picture of my great-grandmother and her parents from 1898 when she was 3 in my photo album. It survived several wars, regimes, and revolutions. No current digital tech in general can provide this kind of longevity
That's because digital storage didn't exist then... Now it's easier and cheaper to store media than ever before
Maybe I'm missing something in your argument, but to me it sounds naive?
Or maybe you're just in a nostalgic mood!
It may seem that way, but it's not as simple. A digitized history project in the UK made this assumption, and later worked really hard to get back at the data, [0] is a long description, the Wikipedia entry on the BBC Domesday book doesn't go into all the details. You might believe we've learned a lesson since then, but I don't.
DRM formats are creeping into everything. Right now it seems JPEGs will be usable forever, and that may be; But cultural artificats - games and videos - are already becoming hard to preserve; People only care about convenience, and I suspect a popular 3D-or-lightfield-or-something-format in the future will be similarly hard to preserve 20 years later.
Print media has two main advantages: It requires no equipment/software/license/electricity to use; and treated properly, it has been shown to last hundreds of years.
I have a couple of 20-year-old hard drives that are still mostly readable (12 bad sectors so far), and that's considered a miracle. Usenet history is disappearing, even though it doesn't take a lot of space - because it isn't in anyone's economic interest to keep it - and the same will happen to free cloud storage sooner or later.
> Your house burns down, now what?
He still has the digital copy. And perhaps physical copies that were sent to relatives.
If one has both digital and physical, then either can disappear and be recreated from the other.
Personally, if Lloyd's of London offered an insured storage service, I might believe them, but I can't think of any other organization I would trust with a 100 year promise.
Nothing stops you from having redundancy in printed media. In fact, I have that photo reproduced in another album of my relatives.
>That's because digital storage didn't exist then...
What can you realistically do to keep the digital photo through 120 years or more? Imagine you stored it on the most durable media you have, M-Disc perhaps, or whatever they advertise today. Let's assume it even survived 120 years with its data intact. Are you sure your descendants will have the means to read that M-Disc in the year 2140? How about the file system on it? JPEG or DNG format? With a printed photo, you don't have to be sure.
Online storage is much more complex and thus inherently volatile. You depend on other people and on the assumption that business and legal frameworks will remain the same throughout the archival period.
Digital tech heavily depends on an unbroken chain of content transfer, which is a pretty big assumption for archival-grade storage, considering that companies, encodings and formats come and go, and there are also things like censorship and AI "enhancement" to worry about. (and who knows what else it will be many years into future) Digital media is not static by nature. Admittedly, any media depends on content refreshing, but the traditional media has much longer life between transfers - for an extreme example we still can read Sumerian clay tablets.
>Now it's easier and cheaper to store media than ever before
Storage cost was never a problem. The problem is the separation of the archival-worthy content from the info noise. Now, when the noise is multiplied, selecting is much harder than before. For my case, I only have a few photos worthy of putting into a 120-year photo album for my descendants, because I'm just an ordinary person.
It’s like the post about digitizing VHS the other day. It gets put off until the project is overwhelming.
I am in the process of scanning paper photos and photos on glass plates, dating from 120 years ago or so. Some of them survived two world wars, and mind you surviving WWII in Poland is no small feat for a piece of paper.
So while I do agree with the general sentiment of having multiple copies and backups, our digital world is woefully short-lived when compared to physical media.
On a related note, I am working on gallery/archive software, where the main assumption is longevity: whatever the UI du jour is, actual data must be kept in the simplest and most long-term file formats possible. Which means well-established and documented "traditional" image formats, text files with metadata, etc.
The odds of physical photos destroyed in a fire is far lower than a photo hosting service going out of business. There's no money in it because monitoring it for legal compliance is expensive and time consuming. Apple and Google and Facebook can do it because the monitoring has a business upside in terms of training ML models.
Physical reality is a useful abstraction.
Far better IMO to not rely on a single provider, especially in the case of backups.
A takeout request can take "a few weeks", during which you just can't download them.
Google has also had too many cases of banning accounts with no recourse. I'd be scared for it to be my only backup of something so treasured.
Peergos is an E2EE P2P global filesystem built on top of IPFS, and we have a built in photo/video/audio gallery/player (and other apps too). We don't expose the social graph (who is sharing with who) to the server, and we also obscure things like the number of files, number of directories, size of individual files, even whether something is a directory or file. We are also designed to be resistant to exposure by a quantum computer (mainly we don't rely on asymmetric encryption for privacy, only for sharing, and even for sharing we take measures to protect against a future quantum computer). We also don't rely on DNS or the TLS certificate authorities for security (unless you choose to use the web interface to a public server). We do fine-grained server-less access control using a structure called cryptree [3].
It's P2P so you can mirror your data as many times as you like or just self-host. It's also 100% open source, both client side and server side.
Free/Libre Google Photos, basically.
It's basically a software package on the Synology NAS which creates a locally hosted version of Google Photos (including sharing and gallery capability). It comes with Android/iOS apps that can automatically backups all photos directly to your NAS and thus stay in your own ownership.
There is a cost of entrance though - you need to buy the NAS and harddrives... but IMO there's nothing quite like owning your own data.
Sure, but I already have servers and terabytes of storage. Also, I don't want to keep a server/NAS at home. I want it sitting on a big, fat pipe in some DC with professionals maintaining it.
https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#pho...
Best google photos clone I've come across so far.
My wife and I use it exclusively to auto-backup our mobile photos.
With that in mind, I'd say that yes it works, but is it the right tool? Not really.
First, we don't use the web stuff at all, the app isn't great when it comes to choosing what, how and to which folders things should be synced. It is however useful that I can share my auto-upload folder with my wife's account so she can print the photos I take of our baby daughter, she's almost exclusively the subject of our mobile photographs these days.
Finally, you're almost guaranteed to break it every few updates. I've spent several evening over the past couple of years recovering from updates. Much of this is likely down to my lack of knowledge of FreeBSD, but honestly, it shouldn't be breaking in the first place.
I began writing something in something in Golang, that would use microservices to read out exit data, generate thumbnails and provide APIs to give family members custom photo frames we could push photos to. Unfortunately I haven't had the motivation to continue working on it.
I'll keep looking for something else with good Android apps, preferably written in Golang so it's lean and easy to update that'll do the backup/sharing.
EDIT: no E2EE or mobile support, it’s web based. It is self hosted with a privacy focus.
If you ever find anything odd, confusing, or buggy, please tell me, I'll try to get it addressed asap.
1. Minimize footprint. Keep only the photos that matter; this usually ends up being the ones with you or a loved one in the picture. I spent a weekend consolidating and reduced all my photos for the last 20 years down to 15GB.
2. Use 1 consumer-grade service like Google Photos for easy day-to-day access and sharing; just makes life easier for you and your loved ones to access memories on-demand. This can be substituted with any privacy-friendly alternative or young service like Stingle.
3. Use 1 business-grade storage solution for an off-site backup. Business-grade is critical b/c it enhances the relationship and SLA the provider gives you. I use AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive; it's free to upload, cheap to store ($0.00099/GB/month), and a bit pricey to retrieve ($0.09/GB for egress). This is my last-resort/lifeline if everything else goes wrong and I need to get my data again. To save on per-file upload fees, I zip up pictures by album or year and use 7Zip or Keka to encrypt the zip with a password using AES-256 for added privacy. Also remember, AWS is creating at least 3 copies of your data across 3 AZs in one region!
4. Keep a copy of the pictures at home on an NAS, hard drive, or better yet your computer if you have the space. I already use Time Machine to auto backup my entire Mac on an external drive so this gives me in total 2 copies of my pictures (one on laptop and one on time machine backup).
In total this gives me 6 total copies of my pictures:
- 1x Off-site Google Photos
- 3x Off-site AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive
- 1x On-site Laptop
- 1x On-site Laptop's Time Machine Backup
I'm not too concerned if one service provider loses my pics or revokes my access; plenty more copies!
Please remember this only works if you religiously follow step 1. This will be an expensive and almost impractical setup if you enjoy holding onto 5TB+ worth of photos.
> Perkeep (née Camlistore) is a set of open source formats, protocols, and software for modeling, storing, searching, sharing and synchronizing data in the post-PC era. Data may be files or objects, tweets or 5TB videos, and you can access it via a phone, browser or FUSE filesystem.
Edit Downvoted? I don't understand. Perkeep contains the same functionality as the post, but much more, is much more mature, and is totally open source (not like the posted software, where the important core, the server, is closed source).
There’s a psychological barrier for pre 1.0 releases that must be handled in any serious project.
Anyway, your argument was discussed very recently here: https://github.com/perkeep/perkeep/issues/1307
Perkeep was also a couple of times on HN before, e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18008240
This is an interesting overview/comparison to maybe understand a bit better about the goals: https://perkeep.org/doc/compare
And this: https://github.com/perkeep/perkeep/blob/master/doc/overview....
This makes me run from cryptography implementors.
I use Dropbox and a second copy backend up to my personal server (via Dropbox cli) for photos. Owning that data is too important for me to use a random service accessable only via a phone app.
I'm curious because it's pretty easy to find a postal address for any giant company, however what will you gain from it?
What I gain is trust, without it, I have suspicion.
Along lines of other comments here, none of my other material has even like the same value as my family photos, so I'm stupendously careful with redundancy / multi location backup.
In case anyone cares: local HDD attached to Mac, Synology on local network, folder on there synced to Dropbox and finally Synology C2. Too far I know, but it's worth it.
Mylio is fast, clever (has a nice P2P model for in-network syncing), doesn't have to hit any cloud service if you don't want it to, good search, great management tools. I rate it highly.
What I'd really love is something I can self host. OwnPhotos seems super cool, but apparently it's not stable yet. Are there any alternatives that can be run today?
All we need is to have it be interoperable with something like http://CoBox.cloud (a distributed, encrypted, offline-enabled data hosting cloud platform) and we can set up our own fully encrypted, NSA-impenetrable/surveillance-less cooperative community servers/'cloud'.
In other words, we would benefit from the same economies of scale and low maintance costs that the existing FAANG server farms benefit from, without the invasive privacy transgressions from big corps.
Their documentation is super nice too.
It would be easier to believe if F-Droid was also listed.
...which is work in progress[1]
[1]: https://ente.io
Maintaining a self hosted alternative in parallel requires bandwidth which I currently lack.
Once the product is mature and has sufficient traction, it would be in my best interest to open source the server.
I'd love set of protocols, client and server that combined self-host with cloud - ie: I could self host a shard/mirror for my data, while paying someone for a service too. That way supporting development and have an option in case the project shuts down.
I'll look into https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism for now, I think. Looks like it provides the minimum I need (self host, à way to upload dslr photos, an Android client for mobile pictures).
If you are keen on self hosting, I’d also recommend checking out Piwigo[1] which is actively maintained.
[1]: https://piwigo.org
But bundling a photo viewer/gallery just seems like a bit of bloat to me. I'm love to see an app that does syncing and only syncing.
Styling the app to look like a Google-app is an unusual choice. I've developed a rejection of thing that use this style, mostly since they're always apps actually made by Google.
If you tailor to people trying to move away from google, trying to look like google might not transmit the best impression.
Only the client software is Free Software, the server component has not been released, in source or object form.
That sort of calls this whole paragraph into question.
As for an organizer, nothing has replaced Picasa and it's a shame Google didn't open source it.
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/storage-data-transfer...
My photo library location is on OneDrive and my phone stream is synced to the Mac.
My Mac is also backed up to NAS.
So my pics are in two different physical locations and one offsite. I guess I should have an external drive that I make regular backups to and then take offsite somewhere as well.
*Some people would suggest side load it but your app needs to be compatible with remote control and TV layout.
I miss the excellent facial tagging that Picasa offered and none of these solutions offers any facial tags.
By that I mean to say that I looked at this and thought “great, an O/S backup solution for a NAS” as opposed to a paid-only service akin to a multitude of others.