It’s Blogvent, day 14, where I blog daily in December!

I’ve always liked taking photos of things, but since becoming a parent… I have thousands and thousands of pictures and videos of my children. I like looking at them, I like looking back at different milestones (especially with two babies now, it’s fun to see when certain things happened and how they differ), I share them with friends and family, and sometimes I even print them.

Because I have so many photos and videos, my phone is not enough storage for them. They’re precious enough now that I want to make sure they’re safe (I say “now” because I was relatively careless about them before, not caring much if I lost them, but now they matter to me more).

Before: Amazon Photos

Back when I worked at Amazon a few years ago, I started backing up my photos to Amazon Photos, and it’s been alright over time.

It’s not a perfect app, but I liked that it synced well to my phone, and it was easy to share with the non-Google and non-iCloud folks in my family. Plus, it’s (mostly) free with a Prime subscription. It’s a totally fine product.

Buuuut:

• I don’t really like being that attached to Amazon in general
• It doesn’t do any sort of face tagging (where I could search for photos of “Joe in Philadelphia in 2022” or something to that effect)
• Your data isn’t that portable (exporting everything at once requires the desktop app, which I didn’t realize until this week)
• The app is just slow enough that it can be annoying to wait for a photo to load

Now: Ente

A friend of mine recommended I try Ente, and I love it so far! Ente is a paid, end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) photo storage service.

It’s open source (which I LOVE), it has on-device facial recognition and search, and it’s cross-platform across iOS, Android, Web, Windows, Linux, and MacOS.

Pricing-wise, it’s not too bad! They offer 10GB free, which worked well for testing it out. As of today, it’s 50GB for $2.49 a month, 200GB for $4.99 a month, 1TB for $9.99 a month, and 2TB for $19.99 a month. I went for the 1TB plan, for now!

It’s more expensive than Amazon Photos, but in a similar ballpark. Amazon Photos has unlimited photo storage included with Prime, but only 5GB included for video. It has 1TB for $6.99 a month (on top of the Prime price).

I’m very okay with paying a bit more to have a better app experience, privacy, and the features that I want, and so far I’m happy with it!

All the options

I thought about other options besides Ente, and went far too deep into the research rabbit hole figuring out what I wanted to do. This is what I found, in case it’s helpful for you to see! Learn from my digging. Save yourself.

Feature	Immich	Synology Photos	Ente	Big Tech
Primary Cost	Hardware + license	Synology hardware	Subscription	Data/Privacy
Privacy	High	High	High	Low
AI Smarts	Excellent (Face, Object, Map)	Basic (Face only, no object)	Good (On-device Face)	Excellent
Setup Effort	Moderate (Docker knowledge)	Low (Pre-installed)	None	None
Lock-in	None (Files are folders)	It depends	Low	Fairly high

I did strongly consider using Immich and hosting everything myself. But after thinking a lot about it, I remembered I am a lazy bum when it comes to maintaining a machine. And I don’t trust myself with being my own sysadmin, honestly. I think I would do this if I had a more dedicated homelab setup, but because I don’t, I got nervous committing to buying hardware and going that route.

Shameless referral

If you sign up for Ente yourself, use code N4Z7QU so we can get 10GB more free! I promise I’m not paid by them. I just like free things.

Bye

Anyway, Ente has been good so far, and I’m feeling optimistic about it as a solution for me. Do yourself a favor and check it out if you wanna move away from the big tech options!