Tldr:
- 16GB: free
- 150GB: €30/yr
- 1TB: €100/yr
- Encrypted
- Likely on-server, because they have AI facial recognition for searching photos by face.
- Based on Immich
Well that’s quite some prices. Google just informed me that our family has used 83% of our space and our next tier is 2TB for 10e/month.
The 1TB plan for Pixel Union is also €10/mo. I wanted to note the yearly price, since that’s usually the cheapest, but if you’re paying monthly, expect that.
They also have add-on pricing for additional storage needs, which you can find via a slider on their pricing page, up to 20TB.
That’s still twice the price
It’s their only service, they make money by customers paying them to host their photos. They don’t subsidise by crawling through all of your photos, mails, documents and then use that information to display Search and YouTube ads getting money from advertisement seals.
If its too expensive for you then it’s what it is, but it’s unrealistic to expect small scale competitors to outperform big tech offerings on every front.
You are off course absolutely correct.
I have started lately to pay extra to get the service/quality/production location I want. So why should this be any exception.
Thanks for reminding me
It is. I wasn’t advocating for them, just sharing pricing.
They detail their encryption strategy here: https://pixelunion.eu/help/other/data-security/#how-our-encryption-works
Thanks!
I’m a little concerned about their implementation. It seems that there’s two private keys that exist on two servers, each in different countries…? One is used for encryption of the data, and one is used to decrypt the key for the former case. In that way, stealing one server isn’t enough, but stealing both would (right?). Obviously, there’s jurisdictional and sovereignty hurdles, but that still doesn’t seem as secure as having each person owning their own private key locally.
Or maybe I’m just dumb and don’t get it.
That’s the main issue with how Immich has been developed: the main assumption was always that the end user would either self-host it on their own machine, or use disk encryptions (e.g. LUKS) for VPS.
The issue is that if you try to make it a SaaS, like PixelUnion does, there’s no real way to prevent the PixelUnion admins from accessing your data.
I have good hopes for https://zeitkapsl.eu/en/ , hopefully at some point they allow self hosting and then it will be possible to do what PixelUnion does with Immich, but with proper E2EE
You can’t do face detection or other features with E2EE. It’s a design choice, and I think Immich fills a great spot as a google photo replacement, leave E2EE to other tools
Ente does face detection with E2EE. Those features happen client side rather than server side.
Got into self-hosting for this very reason. I’ve been running immich (the FOSS basis underneath Pixelunion) for 1.5 years now. I’ve even bought a server license to support the team. It’s ridiculously good software!
Note that I’m not even a techie or network guy by trade (though I’ve travelled far down the rabbit hole since). Spinning up immich on a local computer (not even a dedicated server) to make backups is relatively easy. If I could do it, it’s not unlikely you can, too.
I use three 1TB drives for all my photos and files (so three replicates). One is a NAS connected to my router, the other is in my bedroom and the third is offsite (should the house burn down). Works like a kiss.
