Ask HN: Are you interested in a privacy-first photo management solution? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are you interested in a privacy-first photo management solution?

We're building a privacy-first photo management solution. We aim to provide the convenience of cloud-based solutions, with the privacy that their architecture can't offer. We're looking for our first users! If the idea sparks your interest, please answer these questions to see if there's a fit: https://duf1rbk6mma.typeform.com/to/yndxOz1n

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Can you go a bit more into how you are putting privacy first? Of course, it will also depend upon how you are planning to monetise. If it is a subscription like offering, you would need a solid privacy focusing reason to bring in customers. I have been looking for a solution that I can self host and works like a photo library, not just a file browser. Of course, the subscription model would work for people who don’t want to self host.

Hi @rochak. I've been wanting something similar for a while and have been working on my own solution with a focus on privacy and open source. For this reason all image analysis (AI/location awareness etc.) is done locally and it can all run within a Docker container. This is the site so far and there's also an online demo: https://photonix.org/

Hi @damian. That looks pretty cool. I’ll check it out. Just a small question - Is there any future plan to have a UI/UX that looks like a photo library, kind of like Google Photos. I understand that a lot of tagging and organising can be done using metadata, but I prefer building my own library and customising it. Nevertheless, this is pretty close to what I have in mind and because it is open source, I’ll see if I can extend it a bit to suit my needs.

Hi @rochak. Thanks for the feedback. We do allow for tagging but the UI is a bit hidden on the photo detail screen right now. If you click a thumbnail and then scroll down you can see the auto generated tags, histogram, location and can add tags of your own. I'm going to change that part of the UI soon so it comes in from the right I think and has an icon to access it.

I also want to allow selecting of multiple thumbnails to do batch operations. I guess that's a better way for doing many photos at a time.

The current solutions are to either store your photos with Google, at the expense of privacy, or store them on your own servers, at the expense of running those servers.

We'd help you store, sync, and serve your photos across the devices you already own. The goal would be to have all of the convenience of Google's servers with the privacy of your own. Users would pay a subscription for the service, regardless of how much they store or serve.

Not me, to much effort and everything is botnet. For “privacy” you would need a complete OS in an isolated space. Probably dedicated hardware too. Kaspersky was spot on

Anyway, there must be a market for that. The value proposition could be meaningful

Why use this and not iCloud Photo Library, for example?

With iCloud, you need to trust your photos with Apple. That trust has some benefits and some costs. Some people like the convenience, but others are more worried about decreased privacy and decreased autonomy.

Our solution is a peer-to-peer network of your own devices - we help you manage your own photos. You don't need to trust any cloud provider to store your photos and not rip you off for it.

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