That’s my next project to get things from Google/Apple.
The options I’ve seen so far
- Immich: great if you can self-host, but I prefer not to, so that’s out for me
- Nextcloud on a VPS (Hetzner or others): you need E2EE to prevent the providers from seeing your photos, but then all the apps like Memories etc don’t work ( https://help.nextcloud.com/t/end-to-end-encryption-nextcloud/237705/3 )
- Ente: has E2EE embedded, the face recognition happens on the clients. Can be self-hostable, so that gives more trust that other providers can launch their own European instances in the future.
- https://zeitkapsl.eu/en/ : has E2EE, but no self hostable option, so you kind of have to trust them that they implement their design (which is actually kind of nice: https://zeitkapsl.eu/en/e2ee-architecture/ . They have a security audit on their roadmap (announced 8 days ago: https://zeitkapsl.featurebase.app/en/p/formal-security-audit )
Any option I am missing?


I use Cryptomator connected to an Exoscale S3 bucket. It’s not particularly convenient, but it’s very cheap and I use it just for photo backup anyway.