I’m confused, is this about cloud storage, or the Google gallery app, or the camera app? I’m using fossify gallery and local-only storage, but haven’t yet switched camera apps. I guess I should.
So… how are yall storing your photos?
Offline server?
Proton Drive? I am skeptical about this one. I know Proton is more secure on paper. But it is like going from 1 walled garden to another.
Asking because right now we are paying for Google One 2TB, which is shared between my families. We have… A LOT of photos (some videos but mostly photos).
i use Synology Photos on my NAS, its fast, convenient, and the data stays mine. I simply pipe it through Pangolin and can access it from anywhere, my phone library is always empty.
I don’t care about photos, hardly take any, so can’t give you an exact answer, but I assume self-hosting is the best approach.
I run Immich on a cheap dell desktop I got off ebay (7th gen i5 CPU in it), it has 2 HDDs in a mirror and sends encrypted backups to online storage at Backblaze using Restic.
A European hosted bucket and a selfhosted immich instance
I never give apps I distrust permission to my photos, I instead select the photos in my gallery app and share them with the app. And as a side note, many users have cloud backups enabled, whether intentionally or accidentally (having clicked “accept” once, instead of “ask me later”); so big-tech likely stores a copy of the actual pictures, and depending on how lackluster the defaults are regarding privacy, have full access to it.
The API for apps is also flawed. I’m not sure about Android but on iOS apps are told whether the user has given them full or partial access, and some apps needlessly ask for full permissions when they don’t need it. Apple themselves set a bad example with this, iMovie for iOS won’t even launch without full photos access
On devices I use personally I haven’t encountered such examples for years, because the first thing I do is substitute first-party apps with FOSS alternatives. My mom does however, and her Samsung’s camera app for example, won’t function unless you give it permission to scan for nearby devices; among others, which I can’t fully remember. So the stock Android experience seems similar to what you’re describing for iOS.
And with the current state of machine photo classification, they can sort out at least some subset of the interesting ones, so it won’t just be a ton of noise they need to sift through if say they are looking for nudes or post-its with passwords written on them.
It’s great to see actual examples shown in their videos, like the
exiftooloutput. I really appreciate how well they integrate and present info, like the editor note being shown on the simulated Mac screen.Don’t care.
