For the selfhosters, come jump into Immich - it’s google photos at home, full control of your data.
Once they release workflows I’ll rollout to my family (main thing missing for new is auto add photos from my son in shared album).
I appreciate the privacy-first model, but I don’t think I can ever go back to paid subscriptions for my photo and video storage. Not only does it cost a fortune over time, but when the company eventually folds or changes their policy for the worst, it’s a nightmare to get your photos and videos to another platform.
Self-hosting is what I prefer, although, I can appreciate that it’s not an option for everyone.
In the case of ente, they have gone above and beyond to give full control to their users of their backing up process and backed up media:
- they provide a sync feature from ente to a local destination on your computer using the desktop app. It can run continuously to reflect all changes to your media and its organization in ente.
- they provide a CLI, so that you can program and implement your own export behavior it seems.
To me, it really shows they care about the users and do their best to avoid vendor lock-in.
And I personally feel much more confident in a company when their business model is a paid one. I’m a very happy customer, I have also convinced multiple people who seem happy too.
I don’t mean to talk negatively at all, and their product looks amazing (especially with the added context you’ve provided).
For me, based on my own experience and the huge amount of storage needed to keep my photos/videos safe, it’s not cost-effective for me personally. If the choice was any of the other paid services or Ente, I think Ente would be the clear winner from the sound of it.
I didn’t take it as a critique of Ente, not to worry! I’m not affiliated in any way, I just wanted to provide some context to people who may be concerned about the vendor locking aspect specifically.
Of course how you manage your media, your needs and your finances are all a very personal matter, I also self-host my photo backup, but I use ente in a complementary fashion, and I don’t backup everything to it. It just makes it convenient to collect, share and aggregate media between ente members and non-members.
Cheers!
Ente is self-hostable.
Is it?? They don’t make that evident anywhere on their website. All I see is a pricing page with no hint that it can be self-hosted.
Thank you. Any reason why they wouldn’t make it more apparent from their homepage? I’m always interested in self-hosted solutions, and even I ducked out of there after seeing only subscription plans being offered.
A software’s website and docs are very telling, aren’t they? It’s like a cultural thing from the creators, some open source software will always be more business oriented, others are more helpful towards homelab /self-hosting users.
See their github for self-hosting.
Ente is self-hostableEdit: nvm, somebody already pointed that out
Have you tried/are you using Immich?
I may have tried the demo at some point (along with other Self-hosted solutions for photo backup), but Synology Photos does what I want without any real setup.
For search, I use a paid software called Excire Foto (German origin) that uses local-AI. I point it to my network folder, and it creates its own database away from my originals. Expensive software, but it’s been worth it. Synology photos also has searching by subject, but Excire is far more contextual and easily beats out anything that Google Photos offered.
their service is very cheap, though. but yeah if you can selfhost it, and expose it to family that’s good
Like with all other online services, it’s cheap until your collection grows. I basically outpaced Google Drive (at the time), and it would have been significantly more expensive to continue with their paid plans. So, I invested in hardware. LOL
But realistically, if you have a smaller photo/video collection, then I think it would be just as easy to spend $5-10 a month and forget about it. I was working with decades worth of images, so I would quickly outgrow any 1, 2, 3TB plans.
It’s paid.
- So is Google Photos
- Any privacy-focused service will be a paid one - how else will they make money?
- It’s free but you have to pay to get more space
- That is justifiable, but posts like these never say it at first.
Self host options exist
Of course
But the article is about a publicly available service
Can’t you self host ente? I thought you could
Yep you can
I switched to Ente recently and like it a lot! It’s been a good experience. There is still some work to be done here and there, but there’s a very strong core there. Devs are open about plans and definitely listen to her feedback.
Is there any Immich / Ente comparison?
