1. You could unlock it with your regular web2 way (Gmail, email-password, etc) or use your crypto wallet (==> complete privacy).
2. Photos would be encrypted and then distributed over IPFS --> No one except you can ever recover them
3. There'd be on-device ML features so that you could still get the useful features - search by person's face, search for a picture of church, etc.
What would tip you to leave Google Photos in favor of such a product?
Did you look at products like skiff? - https://www.skiff.org
Also, I don't think people usually want to host their own servers.
There are countless people running Nextcloud and/or SyncThing on Pi and NAS too. Hell, that there are so many consumer NAS brands tells me that people want to run their own servers.
Plex, anybody?
Google Photos/Drive has lost my photos before: https://twitter.com/hammyhavoc/status/1462734780143968257
This uses IPFS. "They", the people asking the question, don't "have" your photos. Did you read the description in the original post?
I don't want to use either for my photo library versus my own server and backup solutions. Go figure.
I've been looking at storing users GPS data, but more than just encrypted for privacy, I think it is important to think about how you give other apps access to the data.
The approach I'm researching is how to manage an access control list for such an environment.
I'd think it would be the same for photos. I want my photos stored somewhere, and possibly with other people and apps. So picture the next Instagram, but rather than Insta storing the photos, they have access to my photos, when the next app comes along, I don't "re-upload" or start fresh, I give them access to my library (or portion of my library, but that's probably a later step).
Any thoughts on that?
However, this is massively tricky. How can you say that the next Instagram still uses square pictures, has the concept of likes, etc.
Though decentralized social networks provide portability, using it in reality is very difficult.
Most social networks are fairly consistent on "likes", but then you've got things like linkedin that have different "emotions".
This is one reason why I think GPS data is a good trial area for this. A fairly standard format, and most of the value add comes from the app you are using it with.
I'd not heard of DeSo before. Thanks for giving that reference.
If you can't do that, then effort and money put into moving my content there would just be wasted because the hard problems of managing problematic content is why there are not a bunch of services like the one you are proposing. The hard problems aren't technical, they are the economic incentives of bad actors.
Good luck.
Also when you store it fully encrypted how can I trust that that is the case, all I see (I assume) is my data once I provide the correct password.
Somewhat related: is there a photo album app that supports region annotations in some non propriatary way?
Would rather just operate in Web 1.0 and download to my computer every few months.
Don't let that stop you though, I'm probably not your target market.
I’d have to see the implementation, the privacy policy, and the exportability of my photos and metadata before I’d even consider it.
I already paid for the hardware to run nextcloud at home.
I don't need anything else.
