Sustaining Proton’s mission over time | Proton

starman@programming.dev to Technology@lemmy.world – 391 points – Sustaining Proton’s mission over time | Proton
proton.me

Proton's mission, funding sources, independence, and community are some of the reasons we're more resilient than other privacy-first companies.

75

You are viewing a single comment
View all comments

I hope they might consider a Proton Photos, since Google Photos really holds me to Google Drive. And Proton AI for working with documents on Proton Drive.

Proton Photos as a simple archive sure. Drive can already do that.

But they won't be able to do any of the fancy AI driven features, as they would all require Proton to have direct access to the images. That goes against the whole idea of Proton.

Same problem with AI document features.

It would be cool if they offered a local client to do the AI processing but it's not hard to see a few problems with that. It would be pretty difficult to sustain.

I mean iOS already does that locally, but since Photos is Apple’s app, unlike other apps, it can run in the background all the time while charging and do the ML stuff

I am not asking for a replacement to Google Drive, since that's clear, I'm asking for a replacement to Google Photos, which means I'm referring to the functionality that makes Google Photos a separate product to Google Drive (aka, the fancy AI features, automatic image compression, automatic sorting, albums, search, etc).

I don't know if it goes against Proton's philosophy, that's kind of besides the point. I'm just saying that for me to move from Google's suite, as I would like to, this would be a blocker for me with Proton. It's fine if Proton doesn't want to address that market, it just means I personally would find it difficult to make the switch (and likely wouldn't) even though I like a lot of what Proton is doing.

Actually it is possible to do it locally! A photo management service called Ente.io is already implementing it.

Can I interest you in a great self-hosted alternative Immich? Been using it for nearly a year now, amd its getting better every few months.

I'm sure it can work well for many others, so thanks for the recommendation, but personally I'm not interested in self hosting.

Proton Drive can already automatically back up your phones photos. What else do you want? Albums?

All the things that make Google Photos a separate product to Google Drive... that's what I'm talking about.

OK, we'll they're not going to have that. They're just not going to implement facial recognition or search images by text or map the photos baed on the geolocation metadata. They're just fundamentally anti privacy features. I doubt they'd even implement photo editing and callages or whatever