AWSPics VS photos-app

I use https://github.com/jpsim/AWSPics , which takes care of everything. It's great IF you're comfortable with your whole photo solution being cloud-based (but you still own and control it, you're not just handing it all off to a SaaS), rather than being self-hosted. Personally I prefer the former these days, but I know that I'm in the minority here on HN.

With AWSPics, sync your photos (just a simple directory tree on your local device) to S3 (I just do it manually from time to time from my desktop, but no doubt it can be done automatically at regular intervals, and/or it can be done directly from a phone), then Lambda functions generate thumbnails and browsable galleries (as static HTML), then you can view it all via CloudFront (password-protected using Origin Access Identity).

AWSPics isn't really being actively maintained these days. But it still works fine for me. The setup is cheap, you basically just pay for the S3 storage (currently costing me a bit under $1/month - and I guess you could use a cheaper S3-compatible alternative like Backblaze and reduce your costs further). No server to set up or maintain. Durable backup built-in. Fast reliable CDN built-in.

I migrated my photo collection to https://github.com/jpsim/AWSPics about a year ago, pretty happy with it (so much so that I ended up contributing a number of features and bug fixes back to it). Basically all you have to do, after the initial setup, is an S3 sync to upload new photos, and a gallery web site and resized thumbnails get generated automatically.

All private, you configure usernames and passwords. The ongoing cost is just that of S3 standard / infrequent-access storage, which for my collection of ~50GB is currently costing me about ~$1/month. In terms of the auto-generated gallery (lambda function that traverses an S3 bucket) and the password-protection (CloudFront Origin Access Identity), you're locked in to AWS. But in terms of the data, you by definition have all the files in a simple folder tree on your local disk too, you can back it up wherever else you want, you can migrate it elsewhere quite easily. And AWSPics itself is open-source.

ente - encrypted photo storage (version 0.7.92): ente is an end-to-end encrypted photo storage app

The format isn't natively supported on mobile, but we can transcode and render them. We have created an issue to track this: github.com/ente-io/photos-app/issues/1269

Hey, we've added an item to our roadmap to configure a lockscreen different from the system lockscreen: github.com/ente-io/photos-app/issues/1240

Hey, this is already on our radar: github.com/ente-io/photos-app/issues/1226

Hey, not sure how popular this feature will be, since all your metadata is end-to-end encrypted and only accessible to you, but have added this to our roadmap anyway: github.com/ente-io/photos-app/issues/1219

We don't automatically sync media movement from the device to ente, as users might have already organized their media on ente, possibly on a different device. However, we understand that this could be a valuable feature, perhaps as an album-level configuration. We've added this to our roadmap.

Hey, we recently added support to playback Motion Photos to our Flutter app.

We also wrote a guide to set it up. Our code is open source, so you can easily refer to the crowdin config and GitHub action config.

ente - encrypted photo storage (version 0.7.43): ente is an end-to-end encrypted photo storage app