I have a custom domain setup and I can share an album with people without Ente, they can add their photos too.
The ML for facial clustering/recognition is definitely a step behind what google does in the cloud (especially on kids). But with a small amount of massaging it's a very good product.
I went with Ente for this reason. I have 5 family members on my plan. They'd have likely joined my immich.
1) I don't want their photos on my server in a form I could view. My brothers a stand up guy, but you never know what people are into.
2) I've spent the last 2 years convincing people the cloud is someone elses computer and google can access your photos if it's not E2EE. To then get them using my server.
There was another reason which they solved in the latest release (my wife and I share an album of our daughter automatically via facial recognition).
I guess while I'm at it, the final reason I went with Ente even though it's paid was due to not wanting to be the failure point of my families photos, doing backups etc.
If you have your server encrypted at rest, don't you have to manually enter a password or use a hardware key each restart? And then it's not encrypted when running.
> If you self host, why does it matter if it is E2E? What's your threat model?
I prefer E2EE services because clients like GrapheneOS, iPhones, and Macs are a lot harder to hack than a server. And I use Cloudflare tunnels for convenience.
It's also just got really good apps and UX. On par with iCloud photos for the most part, which uses the same model when you have advanced data protection turned on.
Family members, once understanding, would be put at ease by the E2EE. And many people don't self host, so when using it from Ente it's essential. And they just release the stack they themselves run.
I've considered embedding an HSM in my concrete floor, with a USB-cable sticking out to plug into the server. :)
Assuming someone either steals your entire server or nothing, it's either that, password at boot, or some remote unlock (KSM). I doubt a burglar is going to just steal your harddrive. But I doubt they'll think of opening the floor.
Can you quantify the "harder to hack han a server"? This seems like one of those risks that is superficially true, but in practice is low enough to not matter.
