Alright, how do you all handle your photos? Self-hosted Immich, Hetzner Nextcloud, Ente or Zeitkapsl? (piefed.zip)

submitted 6 months ago by Blaze@piefed.zip to c/privacy@programming.dev

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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?

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[-] A_norny_mousse@piefed.zip 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

What? Disk encryption is definitely "allowed", and yes, that is how you should do it. It's not "cumbersome" either, most installers have a GUI for that, and if Hetzner offers preconfigured images, full disk encryption is probably one of the offers.

I am now convinced that you are a little overwhelmed by the thought of managing a VPS. That is totally OK! But don't go talking out your ass because of it.

[-] Blaze@piefed.zip 1 points 6 months ago

I was answering based on this thread ( https://old.reddit.com/r/hetzner/comments/1hi6ktq/how_to_use_encrypted_rootfs_on_cloud_instancesvps/ ) with the following steps

Snapshot VM (in case things go terribly wrong)
Backup data somewhere (space/object storage)
Reinstall OS with hetzner installimage (reboot VM into rescue). https://community.hetzner.com/tutorials/install-ubuntu-2004-with-full-disk-encryption (Maybe first take a test VM as the post install script will take a few attempts to customize it for debian)
Provision VM
Restore data

The definition of "cumbersome" will vary from person to person.

I am now convinced that you are a little overwhelmed by the thought of managing a VPS.

Indeed, that's why I want to avoid to self host in the first place.

Not sure about the "talking out of my ass" part.

this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2026

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