I have a baby and I’ve been real wary of posting her pictures on social media. My fiance is Inna similar boat but more OK with big tech (or at least, doesn’t have the tech background to look for alternatives).

My family lives far away. Right now, we just text pictures every week. But I’d like to have a place where we could share the pictures, and maybe everytime we share it’d send an email to those that want to see them updating - something they should be able to set (my mom would want notifications every time, my siblings might prefer a weekly digest).

Basically, Google Photos would work. Instagram or Facebook might be better. But I don’t want big tech feeding my baby to AI.

I have a post covid laptop (Dell Inspiron) that I don’t use much. Occasionally, I do use it, could I self host on that? I don’t think I can justify a service being more than $30ish a month.

I’m thinking about creating an instance of Pixelfed (or whatever its actually called)

I obviously want it to be locked the fuck down. My sister in law is having a baby soon too, I think if they like our photo sharing method, they might want to use ours. Would I be able to give them control to choose who can view pictures of their baby? I’ve like how on Lemmy the owner of the instance has to individually approve people, but I wouldn’t want to be doing that for my sister in laws family - just give her and hubby access to approve and deny.

Is paid web hosting the better and less techy way to go about this? I don’t work in tech, and I don’t have lots of time to troubleshoot, so the easier the better, if there’s a trustworthy service for my needs too. I’m not too intimidated by a more difficult/techy setup, but I want low maintenance. If I do use a web hosting service, does anyone have recommendations for ethical hosts that won’t just feed our data to AI? Obviously not using AWS.

  • BCsven@lemmy.ca
    6·
    2 days ago

    Proton Drive might be easiest as you can share folder links to family.

    Immich Server for self hosting, but since you said you don’t have time to tinker, go with something like Proton.

    • A_be_seedy@beehaw.orgOP
      2·
      2 days ago

      What would be some of the benefits of Immich? Is it just a lot of upfront tinkering or constant tinkering?

      • _Nemo_@lemmy.ml
        3·
        1 day ago

        Immich is dead-easy to set up on its own. I’m a great fan and have been running it for >2 years now.

        That said, I don’t think it’ll work for you because:

        • I gather you have little experience in self-hosting services. Sure, one can learn all that, but if you’re becoming a parent soon, your priorities will be elsewhere (as they should).
        • self-hosting stuff isn’t a one-shot - it does come with maintenance costs. You need to keep your boxes up to date, swap out dead hardware, manage backups… You may not have time for that.
        • Running immich itself is relatively easy. But running it securely is a different can of worms. Immich is a young project, written by enthusiasts, but not vetted for security like professionally-deployed software is. Thus, it’s not advisable to expose it to the open internet. Since you want to share access to others, you’d have to setup Wireguard VPN tunnels for your relatives, which complicates matters.

        Obviously, I’m making a lot of assumptions about you. Whether these are true is up for you to decide.

      • BCsven@lemmy.ca
        2·
        1 day ago

        It is basically Google Photos so your phone can backup to your own server and has face recognition so you can filter by people. Also has albums and timeline organization.

        You have to setup a mini PC or Pi on your network. Its a bit of fiddling with docker to setup and configure, but after that there is nothing to do until an update comes out.

        You would need some techy skills to set it up initially.