Comment by Jhsto
4 days ago
You can use https://ente.com/ (it's open-source). It also makes the seemingly much better decision of storing photos in S3.
4 days ago
You can use https://ente.com/ (it's open-source). It also makes the seemingly much better decision of storing photos in S3.
The point of Immich is self hosting. Using AWS defeats that purpose
S3 has many open implementations you can self host. Some are quite lean even. Unless you need really complex IAM stuff it's a solid and rather simple experience to run it.
This is a good point. I'd rather have something with the S3 option, so I can serve the pages from my house but the images from a speedier source.
Yeah but Immich provides a lot more features than just storage
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Perfect is the enemy of the good. While there's an ideal case where you're hosting it on a box in your house, that's not for everybody. So while hosting it on AWS doesn't remove every dependency on big tech, at least it's not a full on Google hosted SaaS product.
I think "perfect is the enemy of good" is actually an argument against AWS integration. Using S3 as a backend is a lot more complex than using local storage so it would take a lot more time to implement, that's why local storage is good enough
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Ente’s cloud-hosted solution does not use S3:
https://ente.com/reliability/
For self-hosting, “S3” usually just means “S3-compatible.” Although maybe that’s exactly what you meant.
+1 for Ente. Replaced Google photos for me
Thank you for the tip! Luckily there are some useful and thoughtful commenters on HN too, other than all the downvotes and negativity :-)
Apparently HN does not like "not self hosting" and/or "e2e encryption" ?
Meanwhile, i also found https://zeitkapsl.eu/
I think I dug my own grave by not being explicit that I thought S3 as a protocol and not the AWS product. :)
To elaborate a bit further, the S3 layer makes sense once you self-host S3 yourself. This allows clusterization of multiple hosts to offer redundancy in self-hosted setting -- for example, a friend of mine and I run S3 instances and "seed" each others' buckets for photo storage, but also for package manager (Nix). Having this kind of sane object storage just expands in use-cases, like with Matrix, etc., which all then inherit the clusterization hence redundancy for free.
The E2E encryption is also very useful when you are backing up or hosting photo galleries for friends and family -- because you cannot do metadata analysis on encrypted files, they have to do that on their own devices. This makes self-hosting much more "fearless" because I do not have to account for the fact that when/if my nodes are becoming a sauna-stoves for doing inference when someone dumps an album in.
The datasets that I have are terabytes. At some point it's just cheaper (accounting your time as free) to buy a 20tb drives and get yourself a runway for 5 years or more + space to do other stuff.