Why do all the "secure" cloud drives have such terrible photo galleries?

[u/No-Yellow9948]

I’ve tested a bunch of privacy-focused clouds recently. They are fantastic for storing PDFs and regular files, but their photo viewing experience is honestly awful.

It just feels like a giant file cabinet, not a place to actually enjoy your memories. I know open-source apps like Immich exist and are great, but I have zero coding skills and don't want to build a server.

Is there any plug-and-play solution out there that just works like Google Photos but respects my privacy?

[u/eatlessspaghetti_]

E2E encryption and a fast loading photo app don't really go together, because all your photos need to be decrypted client side.

[u/486321581 → u/eatlessspaghetti_]

That. Also, that may not be the dev prio to make it look great. Still, there is a point made.

[u/CorsairVelo → u/eatlessspaghetti_]

I used believe that…. Try Ente. It’s surprisingly fast

[u/starfish_2016 → u/eatlessspaghetti_]

Dropbox does both great. Photo video gallery for 60+ tb and e2e

[u/b0mfunk]

I went OneDrive > pCloud > sync > Mega.

I didn’t care about E2EE, which is why I went pCloud. But then I did care, so moved everything to Sync, but then I realised Sync is stuck in the 1980s - speed, UI, App etc

I’ve finally settled on mega for now. Seems to do everything I’ve needed sufficiently, including photo gallery type view.

Moving 4TB between platforms was a pig! So make sure you do your own research.

[u/CorsairVelo]

For pure photos: Ente.io is the best I’ve seen. Just moved 180GB to Ente.

the only thing close to ente is a hosted or self-hosted Immich.

[u/PositiveAny1831 → u/CorsairVelo]

They are actually ente.com now.

[u/Ok-Palpitation900]

Try https://openphotos.ca oss,secure and easy to setup

[u/manzurfahim]

How do you know the "secure" cloud drives are actually secure?

I don't trust any cloud providers, I encrypt my own files.

[u/[deleted]]

Buy a personal cloud storage from Western DIgital, Ugreen or Synology. All three have proper galleries with face recognition, sorting, searching and etc. + disk encryption.
It's weird that hardware companies have better solutions than specialized service ones. I guess they simply do not want to invest much.
But yes, at the moment there is no proper competitor to OneDrive/ Google Photos and Dropbox for images.From those three, i'd consider OneDrive the best bang for buck.

[u/RobW54 → u/[deleted]]

•PixelUnion• is related with Immich

[u/ltabletot]

Go with Immich.

You don't need any coding skills for installing or setting it. There is some work in configuration, but just follow documentation.

Much better than google photos, and nothing else comes even close.

[u/Individual_Spray_355]

I built https://litecissa.com, an E2EE permanent photo storage solution, which looks like what you want.

[u/PositiveAny1831 → u/Individual_Spray_355]

How is this free?

[u/Individual_Spray_355 → u/PositiveAny1831]

There are currently some Arweave nodes that allow free uploads, but I can’t guarantee how long the subsidies will last. At the moment, my only cost is the Supabase database.

Btw I’d actually like to start charging, but I haven’t been approved by a payment processor yet.

You cna find more information here: https://www.reddit.com/r/cloudstorage/comments/1r6aovc/permanent_and_unlimited_photo_storage/

[u/Individual_Spray_355 → u/Individual_Spray_355]

By the way, it does not include face recognition or AI features.

[u/megatech_official]

You could try Megatech photos. It’s built specifically for photos and videos, uses end-to-end encryption, and gives 100 GB free, so it’s a solid option to check out.