ente.io as a Google Photos alternative?
I've been in the lengthy process of degoogling myself. Email is done, Calendars are done, drive is more or less done (but now at MS, so... yeah) - but a real sticking point is Google Photos.
I just love looking up places and faces and the occasional "This day one year ago" albums really lighten up my day.
Additionally, I am a bit of a hoarder, I never ever throw out photos, so I have right now 101 GB of pictures since 2012. This will be a pain to migrate so I only want to do it once.
I tried Immich, but could not make it work on my NUC with a very limited connection to the Internet and probably because of the vast number of images.
I came across ente.io, and it looks promising. While 4.99€ per Month for 200gb isn't exactly cheap, it feels still okay for hosting all of my visual memories.
But before committing, I would like to get some more feedback on this service, what is nice and what is not so nice and why you feel comfortable with entrusting them with your pictures.
I host a NextCloud instance on a VPS. NextCloud app on the phone handles auto upload of all my photos and there's a photos add on for NextCloud that does what you want for photo memories, check out the 'Memories' add on for NextCloud.
It's of course where I also host all my contacts, to-do, calendar and other files.
I didn't want to leave one cloud provider not under my control, for another also not under my control
The fact you could self host it changes the dynamic though. If you like the page and the integration then why not? You've not much to lose apart from your valuable time in setting up a vps (or self) hosted version of this.
I wouldn't pay them to host it though. At least if you get your own vps or self host, you can back it up, I don't think that's going to be so easy if you pay them to host it. Note that they talk about 'back up' in their docs, but they think that /they/ are the back up for /your/ photos, where as I take a cloud first approach, so my photos cloud is my /main/ place for photos, and I have to back /it/ up, IYSWIM
Apparently, ente.io is also E2E encrypted. I signed up and they gave me a recovery phrase to unlock my pictures vault if I ever lose access. So that looks solid.
I tried hosting nextcloud on my NUC, but I also found the sync to be troublesome. Then again that was a few years ago, so maybe things have improved to be usable?
I've not had any Nextcloud sync issues, from the auto photo upload on Android or iOS, nor from the generic files part on those platforms, plus on Linux and macOS. Never tried it on Windows. There are lots of configurations out there though, and endless use cases.
It looks to be "proper" open-source, so you could always self-host it:
https://help.ente.io/self-hosting/
Yeah, I tried selfhosting with Immich and wasn't convinced, but I guess that was also my fault.
My only "VPS" is a NUC on my home internet connection, which I access via Tailscale. I felt that the syncing had too many problems in this setup. I don't think that ente.io would be better or easier to selfhost, which is why I am looking to pay somebody to do it.
I'm going to copy/paste an older post of mine, because I'm still on the hunt. Any suggestions are welcome.
There's a plethora of online photo libraries out there, but from the ones I've test drove, they're lacking in the ability to quickly do super basic editing.
I don't really care about advanced editing, but I want a web-based open source photo library with: