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.

  • A_be_seedy@beehaw.orgOP
    6·
    1 day ago

    Its looking good to me! I can’t figure out if the 5 family members is the max that could upload pictures or if 20 or so people could occasionally upload pictures to designated folders. Do you know?

    • _deleted_@aussie.zone
      3·
      1 day ago

      My understanding is that you can pay once and have up to 5 people use the service.

      Can I share my subscription with family and friends?

      You can add up to 5 family members and share your available storage space with them at no extra cost. Each member will get their own private space, and can only access their own photos.

      It looks like you can add subscribers to albums, and they can update with their own photos too.

      How can I share my photos with end-to-end encryption?

      If your friend is on Ente, you can add them as a viewer or a collaborator to your album using any of our apps. They can view your photos, and even add their own photos to your albums, end-to-end encrypted.

      If your friend is not on Ente, you can share a link to your album with them. They can view your photos on a browser, without installing the app or needing an account. You can also allow them to add photos via these links. Even these uploads are end-to-end encrypted.

    • Tm12@lemmy.caEnglish
      3·
      1 day ago

      I think you should be able to create a custom share link for uploads if you don’t need 20 accounts.

    • FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.websiteEnglish
      1·
      22 hours ago

      A word of warning about Ente: I chose them as what I thought would be a good alternative to Google Photos based on a thread like this about a year ago. I’ve had nothing but trouble with them to the point where I can say the only thing that works is the automatic backup function. That’s not nothing but also none of the fluff on top they say they can do. Sharing is a nightmare, especially if it includes videos. They don’t have the server capacity of a multinational tech conglomerate so they offload a lot of processing onto your devices. If you don’t always get the latest and best phone and use older laptops etc. I would not sign up for them.