How do you backup or store your personal photos safely?
The popular, common easiest option is to upload photos unto cloud service like Google Photos or iCloud. However convenience comes with the disadvantage of giving out my data to these companies for free.
Your photos over years or a lifetime gives away a lot of information including location, date, your close friends, your hobbies, favorite places and more.
With some settings turned on in Google Photos, you can get slide shows of your photos with themes, colors, favorite people, highlights of a year and more.
How do you think this is done?
It is because the algorithm or AI can figure out all these based on the metadata in the photos plus what is the actual photo itself. That’s is how it is done.
It can be a great surprise but a little scary at the same time. If privacy is not something you value, then this article is not for you. If it is, then read on.
In this era of artificial intelligence, AI, your data may be used to train large language models, LLM. Large corporations are using such data whether you gave them permission or not.
How Do You Protect Your Photos’ Privacy?
There are privacy focussed services like Ente.io and others that does this. They do not use your photos for such nefarious purposes. The downside is you have to pay if you choose to store all your photos with them but there are options to use it for free. More about this later.
Besides privacy, your photos are end to end encrypted. This means your photos cannot be intercepted midway as it goes over the internet.
The Easiest Way To Use Ente
The easiest way to use Ente is to sign up for their service. There is a free tier that offers 5 GB of photos. After that you have to pay a small fee. The price is quite reasonable as you can see below.
Hosting Ente Yourself
Since Ente’s software is open source software, you can self host your photos. It takes a bit of knowledge to set it up so not for the less technically inclined. You will need to pay for a server if you want to do it online.
I will not cover this aspect of Ente because my photos are backed up offline. The downside of it is off course should I lose my phone before I backup up my photos, those will be lost forever.
You just need to develop the habit of occasionally or weekly backing up your photos to a harddrive.
Using Ente
To use Ente, you just sign up for an account on their website. You can upload photos using a browser, a phone app or a desktop app.
Besides uploading, you can ask it to backup everything or a selected folder.
Using the app is easy. It works just like Google Photos except you need to install the Ente app on your phone.
Leaving Ente
Should there come a time to leave Ente for any reason, you can easily export your data. At the point of writing, exporting your photos out of Ente requires the desktop app.
Something to take note of.
Hope that you found this useful. Let me know if you tried Ente and/or any other photo backup services? What has been your experience with them?