I never give apps I distrust permission to my photos, I instead select the photos in my gallery app and share them with the app. And as a side note, many users have cloud backups enabled, whether intentionally or accidentally (having clicked "accept" once, instead of "ask me later"); so big-tech likely stores a copy of the actual pictures, and depending on how lackluster the defaults are regarding privacy, have full access to it.
this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2026
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Privacy
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The API for apps is also flawed. I'm not sure about Android but on iOS apps are told whether the user has given them full or partial access, and some apps needlessly ask for full permissions when they don't need it. Apple themselves set a bad example with this, iMovie for iOS won't even launch without full photos access
Graphene's scope feature basically lets you share a set of pictures/videos/directory whether it's empty or not and tells the app that it has full access. For snoopy apps just create an empty directory somewhere and set the scope to that and allow access if the app is persistent. More info: https://grapheneos.org/usage#storage-scopes.
On devices I use personally I haven't encountered such examples for years, because the first thing I do is substitute first-party apps with FOSS alternatives. My mom does however, and her Samsung's camera app for example, won't function unless you give it permission to scan for nearby devices; among others, which I can't fully remember. So the stock Android experience seems similar to what you're describing for iOS.
I love the GrapheneOS approach with scopes.
And with the current state of machine photo classification, they can sort out at least some subset of the interesting ones, so it won't just be a ton of noise they need to sift through if say they are looking for nudes or post-its with passwords written on them.
Might I recommend https://f-droid.org/packages/net.sourceforge.opencamera/ and graphene os?
Isn't grapheneOS restricted to pixel phones? Those phones can get quite expensive
Search for used 8a, 9a or 10a, the regular or flagship models are a waste of money. I got my 9a new for 350€
I fot one for 200 just couple days ago. Pixel 8 though.
200? of which currency?
Pixel 8 is a good phone, but it isn't available in my region. The 8a is though, for a reasonable price. If the OS runs well enough I don't really care about how old the phone is. Newer ones are a bit too expensive.
Last time I'd checked the only Pixel phones available weren't supported, it's somewhat viable now.
200 euros. Woth 1 year warranty and 14 d return policy in case I don't like the phone. Check grapheneos.org page for supported pixels. Pixel 8 will be supported till 2030 if remembering right. At least till 2029.
All the Pixel devices in my country are over 600$
Seems like buying in EU and shipping would be a solution.
I picked up a 10a for $250 USD over the summer. It was just a month or 2 before the Pixel 11 models came out so probably Google was liquidating the older model inventory. It's my first GrapheneOS phone and I'm pretty satisfied so far. But I do wish Graphene was available for more brands
I got a pixel 9a for £200 and my previous phone was a pixel 6 which was £150.
Graphine makes a secure camera app you can use on any android phone: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.grapheneos.camera.play&hl=en_US
Bzw: reject convenience
inconvenience confirmed. lol
Works for me in Firefox. Do you have JavaScript disabled or something?
yup, it's jshelter -- that thing causes from problems that it fixes sometimes. :p
That's not very convenient, I must agree.
Ha lol
You want me to go somewhere that isn't YouTube? How inconvenient
/s
Moved to Ente photos for this reason!
It's great to see actual examples shown in their videos, like the exiftool output. I really appreciate how well they integrate and present info, like the editor note being shown on the simulated Mac screen.
So.... how are yall storing your photos?
Offline server?
Proton Drive? I am skeptical about this one. I know Proton is more secure on paper. But it is like going from 1 walled garden to another.
Asking because right now we are paying for Google One 2TB, which is shared between my families. We have... A LOT of photos (some videos but mostly photos).
I'm running Immich.
If you have a really robust Internet connection you can reverse proxy into your home server. Make sure it's SSDs though.
For me I just have 2 people so we share 1tb of a VPS and that satisfies the photos everywhere itch.
I find SSD for images on Immich not to be needed. Just keep thumbnails and database on ssd and you won’t notice the “lag” opening the detailed image from HDD. At least HDDs are cheap(er than SSDs)
I don't care about photos, hardly take any, so can't give you an exact answer, but I assume self-hosting is the best approach.
i use Synology Photos on my NAS, its fast, convenient, and the data stays mine. I simply pipe it through Pangolin and can access it from anywhere, my phone library is always empty.
Give Immich a shot, very easy to containerize and has a much more robust feature set (not to mention open source)
I had the same dilemma, after self hosting Immich for a while I decided on Ente.
There 3 main reasons why I went with Ente over Immich for my family photo/setup even though Immich is perfectly cromulent and easy to setup (and I have the infra)
1) Ente gives 3xS3 storage backups with compliance lock. I was a bit nervous being in charge of uptime/backups of my families photos, this offloaded it to Ente. Once you add in the same replication the self hosted cost increases a bit.
2) Following on from point 1. Immich doesn't easily allow you to encrypt the photos at rest across users, or at least not at default. I didn't want access to my dads photos.
3) One of my favourite use cases of google photos that ente has (and immich doesn't without scripts) was automatically recognising a face of my daughter on all our families gallerys and moving them to a shared album.
I could get past point 1,2 but adding in 3, it made me just want to offload the hastle.
Theres 5 people using my Ente instance at £10 a month (£2 each). I also keep a running local backup of my gallery too.-----
A European hosted bucket and a selfhosted immich instance
I run Immich on a cheap dell desktop I got off ebay (7th gen i5 CPU in it), it has 2 HDDs in a mirror and sends encrypted backups to online storage at Backblaze using Restic.
Proton Drive? I am skeptical about this one. I know Proton is more secure on paper. But it is like going from 1 walled garden to another.
I use Proton for a few services and I think this is an unfair comparison, while you're right to be sceptical and Proton aren't perfect, they're much better than Google.
You need to move to a service that you can egress easy and proton does allow that.
I'm confused, is this about cloud storage, or the Google gallery app, or the camera app? I'm using fossify gallery and local-only storage, but haven't yet switched camera apps. I guess I should.
This video was very worth watching, nicely explained and done!