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You can't really compare Stingle to Google, Apple, or any other cloud photo services. Stingle's whole value proposition is encryption. Google and Apple don't offer encryption-at-rest, and Google in particular is using the photos you upload to learn about you and market to you. If you're looking for cheap cloud hosting and don't care about privacy, last I checked, Google offered unlimited photo storage (with restrictions on individual photo size that are perfectly fine for non-professional viewing and use).

I’m not sure about Google however last time I checked Apple had both encryption at rest and E2EE.

https://support.apple.com/en-ie/HT202303

No E2EE for photos saved in iCloud, but they're encrypted in transit (SSL/TLS) and at rest (they get encrypted on the servers and not your device so not using E2EE).

You have to scroll a bit further down to see “End-to-end encrypted data” on the page you linked :)

With Google photos are encrypted in transit and at rest, but not E2E

What is the need for encrypting photos?

It depends on your paranoia about attack vectors. From photo EXIF data you can figure out what phones and cameras you use, where you took the pictures, and dates and times you've traveled. With AI or looking at the photos you can ID people and other personal details. I sometimes take photos of personal documents that can be OCRed.

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.

The Fappening - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICloud_leaks_of_celebrity_phot...

> - 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.

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.

Looks like just the clients are OSS: https://github.com/stingle

Apple's photo album sharing is so stupid. I can make albums, but then to share those photos I have to make a shared album in which I cannot rearrange nor change the photos once “posted”. If they would just implement sharing of regular albums …. Anyone with an idea why they have not?

NextCloud is generally slow, but with photos - it's unbearable slow. It has multiply layers of cache, which make everything slower(?!), it's slow to show thumbnails, it's slow to go from one photo to another. Basically it's unusable for sharing photos.

It's slow indeed, in my experience, as well, but not unusable.

If you want to self-host your photos, and you don't mind non-free software, you're welcome to try out https://photostructure.com (disclaimer: I'm the author). The beta is available for free in exchange for your feedback.

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!

[1] https://photostructure.com/faq/why-photostructure/

My experience with photos in Nextcloud was vastly improved when I setup the Preview Generator app [1]. Still not blazing fast, but makes the Files app usable again when browsing folders with lots of photos. Significantly better than before.

1. https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/previewgenerator

Is there a solution that would mirror the iCloud Photos collection; where deleting or modifying a photo on iCloud would be reflected on the server?

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.

It's not 100% comparable, but I'm using my Synology NAS with a few TB of space, and the Photostation app. DS Photo automatically syncs pictures from our phones and i manually upload the camera ones. I also use Synology C2 for offsite backup of my whole NAS. Works pretty well.

How do you test backups? (I have the same setup but with some extra paranoia layers that I'm looking to relax.)

The two services that I've found give E2EE photo syncing on just your local devices / cloud services AND have mobile & desktop apps are mylio & photostructure.

Unfortunately not open source, but it is what it is.

> 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.

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.

NextCloud already offers photo sync and gallery functionality that you can self-host. 100% free and open source.