Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
Nextcloud or immich
Upload your photo backups to your own server. You can also use a app like FolderSync to just upload your photos from your phone to your PC or a home NAS.
I have been slowly getting rid of my dependency on cloud services, things like contacts and calendar are a good way to slowly start.
Direct icloud alternative would be proton. Think the unlimited plan gives you like 500GB so that's how I backup my photos. It autosyncs to proton drive and they use e2ee
Have you got a Mac too? You can just sync your photos to that and store them locally, then sync them back across to your devices. That's what I do, no cloud storage involved and you get more control over which devices have which photos
I was looking into Ente but a lot of people were concerned about them being an Indian company and some other things that didn't sound great that I can't remember anymore.
I ended up using immich. I'm relatively happy with it. My camera app refuses to recognize it as a gallery though. But, im switching to graphene shortly so I'll figure that out later
Ente is open source so if self-hosted, it's less of a concern where the company is from
Also it's e2ee, so unless the client is shady, it should be fine as hosted too
Self hosted immich
There's also hosted and encrypted Ente at ente.io.
You can also self host ente.
True but if you're gonna do that, might as well use Immich.
Immich is fantastic!
While I do recommend this, it doesn't answer OP's question of preventing images from going to iCloud
Uhh... Yeah it does. Don't use iCloud. Host your own Immich server and move on with your life
The obvious answer is "stop using iCloud and use Immich instead".
My take is that OP is asking how to disable iCloud, not for alternatives to it
Eithe check out https://ente.com/ which is e2e encrypted, open source cloud photo storage with many nice features or look into self-hosting it or Immich.
Settings -> your name -> icloud -> saved to icloud -> photos “off”.
Turn on advanced data protection.
Back up your photos first.
I also do not store photos on icloud so I understand that a person might want that.
Why do you want that?
You can go through iCloud settings and delete all backups then sign out of iCloud.
You probably know this. And, you might suspect as I do that nothing is ever really deleted, they just disable your access to it and don't do anymore backups. There's nothing we can do about that, we gave it to them, they'll keep it forever, associated with your account, no matter what they say--at least that's what I think. Maybe Apple really does delete it, but I doubt it.
Google doesn't delete anything, I doubt Apple does, either:
Syncthing + any floss gallery app, this is the easyest way since you don't even need a server, just your phone and a PC to automatically sync from time to time
I haven't tried it in forever but last time I tried syncthing on android I just couldn't figure out how to make it work.
Apple positions iCloud as a “must use” — but I still use my phone with syncs and backups going to my computer. No iCloud. All photos get transferred to the computer on each sync, where they get sorted and touched up without the Photos app, and then a curated folder with stripped metadata etc. gets synched back to the phone.
I have three drives of 1TB on which I replicate my entire collection.
Realistically, are you sure you want to ditch iCloud? I know this is a privacy and not a data hoarding community, but even though I self-host Immich, Google Photos (🤮) is still the off-site part of my 3-2-1 backup solution.
U can use so many better alternatives to backup your photos off site, google is training their ai on your photos. You can use proton drive for example. Or choose a provider for cold storage or something.
I didn't mean to imply that I recommend Google Photos (I was hoping the emoji would make that clear), only that OP may want to consider an off-site backup as part of their backup solution. Everyone should. Self-hosting Immich is great, easy, free, etc., but it also shifts the failure point of your potentially irreplaceable photos to single hard drive in your possession, subject to the whims of a house fire, earthquake, etc.
Proton Drive for photo storage is a horrible experience, though.
Cryptomator being used to upload is an option to consider if cloud service providers like Google, Microsoft, or Apple are used. Then those companies will just get gibberish files as opposed to training data.
Proton Drive for photo storage is a horrible experience, though. As someone who has been relying on the free tier Proton accounts for cloud based photo storage for the past year, currently sitting at roughly ~2k files currently that I am very dedicated to keep - How is it a horrible experience?
It's been about 18 months since I last tried to use Proton for photo backup, so maybe things have gotten better. Proton Calendar certainly has. But at the time, it had no support for searching, tagging, or location metadata, didn't respect existing albums, picture previews were unusably slow (maybe because of encryption, in which case, fair I guess) it didn't let you select what folders you wanted to update (so instead of just backing up my camera photos, it would back up downloads, screenshots, memes, etc.). It lacked the ability to select all or groups of photos, even just straight uploading would be painfully slow and fail frequently.
Hetzner + Nextcloud or „Ente.io“