I have a baby and I’ve been real wary of posting her pictures on social media. My fiance is Inna similar boat but more OK with big tech (or at least, doesn’t have the tech background to look for alternatives).
My family lives far away. Right now, we just text pictures every week. But I’d like to have a place where we could share the pictures, and maybe everytime we share it’d send an email to those that want to see them updating - something they should be able to set (my mom would want notifications every time, my siblings might prefer a weekly digest).
Basically, Google Photos would work. Instagram or Facebook might be better. But I don’t want big tech feeding my baby to AI.
I have a post covid laptop (Dell Inspiron) that I don’t use much. Occasionally, I do use it, could I self host on that? I don’t think I can justify a service being more than $30ish a month.
I’m thinking about creating an instance of Pixelfed (or whatever its actually called)
I obviously want it to be locked the fuck down. My sister in law is having a baby soon too, I think if they like our photo sharing method, they might want to use ours. Would I be able to give them control to choose who can view pictures of their baby? I’ve like how on Lemmy the owner of the instance has to individually approve people, but I wouldn’t want to be doing that for my sister in laws family - just give her and hubby access to approve and deny.
Is paid web hosting the better and less techy way to go about this? I don’t work in tech, and I don’t have lots of time to troubleshoot, so the easier the better, if there’s a trustworthy service for my needs too. I’m not too intimidated by a more difficult/techy setup, but I want low maintenance. If I do use a web hosting service, does anyone have recommendations for ethical hosts that won’t just feed our data to AI? Obviously not using AWS.
I use Immich. Works great. Easy to create and share albums, even let people upload to the albums with or without an access password. I run it with Yunohost.
I use vgy.me (UK, script to use it with ShareX or Dropshare, API)
Pixelunion.eu has been working well for oy vacation pics.
I used tiny beans with my family. It’s a micro social network designed for sharing photos with small groups, particularly of babies and kids.
I think Ente might suit you. It allows you to share albums, has end to end encryption, has notifications for updated photos, and the optional AI it uses runs on your local device.
Its looking good to me! I can’t figure out if the 5 family members is the max that could upload pictures or if 20 or so people could occasionally upload pictures to designated folders. Do you know?
A word of warning about Ente: I chose them as what I thought would be a good alternative to Google Photos based on a thread like this about a year ago. I’ve had nothing but trouble with them to the point where I can say the only thing that works is the automatic backup function. That’s not nothing but also none of the fluff on top they say they can do. Sharing is a nightmare, especially if it includes videos. They don’t have the server capacity of a multinational tech conglomerate so they offload a lot of processing onto your devices. If you don’t always get the latest and best phone and use older laptops etc. I would not sign up for them.
My understanding is that you can pay once and have up to 5 people use the service.
Can I share my subscription with family and friends?
You can add up to 5 family members and share your available storage space with them at no extra cost. Each member will get their own private space, and can only access their own photos.
It looks like you can add subscribers to albums, and they can update with their own photos too.
How can I share my photos with end-to-end encryption?
If your friend is on Ente, you can add them as a viewer or a collaborator to your album using any of our apps. They can view your photos, and even add their own photos to your albums, end-to-end encrypted.
If your friend is not on Ente, you can share a link to your album with them. They can view your photos on a browser, without installing the app or needing an account. You can also allow them to add photos via these links. Even these uploads are end-to-end encrypted.
I think you should be able to create a custom share link for uploads if you don’t need 20 accounts.
If you want to self host, I’ve been having a great success with NextCloud, which would fit the bill perfectly and have room for further capability if you wanted it down the road.
Ente or Proton Drive
However Ente is focused exclusively on Photos, though they’ve made small branching outs into “will” storage & an authenticator.
Thanks! With both of these, can anyone with access add pictures? Predominantly its coming from my fiance and I, but I could see up to 20 people wanting to upload their own pictures of our baby.
Also, is there any service that allows for comments/light social media features?
I love the end-to-end encryption!
https://ente.com/help/photos/features/sharing-and-collaboration/share
For Ente at least it looks like the best security is if every invitee has an ente account. Comments and likes are built in.
Proton Drive might be easiest as you can share folder links to family.
Immich Server for self hosting, but since you said you don’t have time to tinker, go with something like Proton.
What would be some of the benefits of Immich? Is it just a lot of upfront tinkering or constant tinkering?
Immich is dead-easy to set up on its own. I’m a great fan and have been running it for >2 years now.
That said, I don’t think it’ll work for you because:
- I gather you have little experience in self-hosting services. Sure, one can learn all that, but if you’re becoming a parent soon, your priorities will be elsewhere (as they should).
- self-hosting stuff isn’t a one-shot - it does come with maintenance costs. You need to keep your boxes up to date, swap out dead hardware, manage backups… You may not have time for that.
- Running immich itself is relatively easy. But running it securely is a different can of worms. Immich is a young project, written by enthusiasts, but not vetted for security like professionally-deployed software is. Thus, it’s not advisable to expose it to the open internet. Since you want to share access to others, you’d have to setup Wireguard VPN tunnels for your relatives, which complicates matters.
Obviously, I’m making a lot of assumptions about you. Whether these are true is up for you to decide.
All of this makes sense and you were dead on with assumptions! Thank you!
It is basically Google Photos so your phone can backup to your own server and has face recognition so you can filter by people. Also has albums and timeline organization.
You have to setup a mini PC or Pi on your network. Its a bit of fiddling with docker to setup and configure, but after that there is nothing to do until an update comes out.
You would need some techy skills to set it up initially.
I’m using a Matrix group chat, mostly, or Nextcloud for bulk stuff. Basic, but works. There probably are better options.
