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Comment by barbazoo

5 years ago

Please please support custom storage back ends, I'd love to use my Dropbox or S3 or whatever to still fully own my pictures. And I'd love to pay extra to opt out of and analysis, tagging, etc of my photos. Basically I'd like the interface to be similar to Google Photos but with a privacy focused storage engine and clients.

11 comments

barbazoo

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DenisM  5 years ago

I concur. However storage is how they plan to make money, so there will need to be a different monetization strategy for BYO storage. As yet I can't imagine any.

EDIT:

I think have an idea! Add the S3/OneDrive/Etc support but comment it out. To make use of it one would have to download the source, XCode, compile it, and deploy it. This puts a cap on the number of people who can do that, so you won't end up with everyone getting a free copy. Those people who are able to do it are likely to be asked for advice by their less techy friend, so this is basically free software to key influencers.... Ok, so this does not sound as exciting as it did before I started typing, but maybe this will lead to something...

  • fy20  5 years ago

    The problem with that is that some kind fellow on GitHub will clone the project, uncomment the code to enable the premium features for free, and change its name. If it's released under a FOSS license, the original authors have little recourse.

    This is what happened with Emby (a media server like Plex). The backend was open source and there was a license to activate premium features. Somebody cloned it, and then released the premium features to everyone for free.

  • vishnumohandas  5 years ago

    So it's a little more complicated than that.

    Our API server runs the following

    - authentication

    - replication

    - differential sync

    - and a few more errands that are necessary for the apps to function

    The solution to this would be to offer a self-hosted variant where you can plug in your S3 credentials. But like I mentioned else where in this thread, maintaining such a project comes with an overhead we cannot afford right now. Hopefully sometime in the future we will be able to afford the necessary engineering bandwidth.

    • barbazoo  5 years ago

      I like how Joplin does it for notes. You authorize them as an application in Dropbox or give them credentials to a S3 bucket. Don't get me wrong. I want to pay for your service. I just have to be able to access and decrypt my files if you had to shut down your service all of a sudden.

      2 replies →

    • toredash  5 years ago

      I would pay for a self hosted solution, or for a solution where I can plug into a backend you support.

      I would also pay upfront, e.g. kickstarter

papito  5 years ago

Heh. Yeah. Been building something like this, where you can have your choice of metadata storage and file storage. Out of the box, it would be Sqlite and the local FS, and then you can become adventurous. Postgres and S3? Elastic and S3? Sure.

Needless to say, years later, I am still building it. For one guy doing this on my own time, it's a lift. Maybe after I quit my job soon :)

  • barbazoo  5 years ago

    Is there something to share and possibly collaborate with others? Just now on the drive home I contemplated doing a POC with S3 storage but I acknowledge hoe much work that probably would be.

    • papito  5 years ago

      My journey with this started back in Java and Play 1. Now it's a Scalatra project. I am rewriting the front-end because the original was written with JS5 and Knockout, becoming essentially dead on arrival and pretty unmaintainable.

      The idea is that the "engine" is going to be open-source, but the UI would be free and proprietary (you would be able to bolt on your own UI).

      Once the UI is presentable to a point where I can actually test the engine against it, it would be ready for collaboration. But again, it's been a rough stop and go. No wonder something like this does not exist.

      To be accurate, this is not a photo management project, it's a full on DAM. But I am doing photos first. Could end up being less ambitious at first, however. Even the baseline is a massive project.