It's fuckin weird to see a company make a decision based on the long term retention of their customers rather than short term profits... I like these guys.

That's so surreal in this day & age. I can't think of any other example where that happened. I use Bitwarden because I don't want all my eggs in one basket, even for Proton who I trust. But good on them for doing a solid for their customers instead of bowing to the forces of pure capitalism.

Not directly, I had to click through to a reddit post

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 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.

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

Thank you for this, been looking...

Yeah, that works fine.

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

I find unless you use the proton password manager the alias feature is too hard to manage from mobile anyway.

Maybe I'll convert from my current manager to it, but I do like the idea of alias emails.

This is the help I was seeking :-)

Not OP, but the lack of Linux support is my biggest issue with them.

Generally, compatability:

No SMTP (so I can send emails automatically from my servers for logs etc), no calendar sync, email sync is only hacky with the bridge, android does not have email sync at all, no contacts sync.

The calendar does not show the birthdays of contacts.

Proton drive for me is useless because no GNU/Linux client (if it comes, pls just make it something I can run headless).

There is more, but that's what I find most annoying. If I have to chose one of these then I'd say that the groupware stuff needs to be synced to any client easily (includes calendar and contacts IMO)

They're talking about making it a nonprofit, I'm sure. People working for nonprofits can have good salaries so its not like they're not good to work for, and any profit can be reinvested into the company or donated to other nonprofits. But you can't sell the company to a for-profit (I don't think), and the ownsers can't take all of the profit for themselves.

If you're planning to subscribe to Proton Unlimited or Proton Family regardless, you might as well try Proton Drive. They try to be fairly privacy focused similar to Proton's other products.

Mega has a similar privacy-oriented design. Such that the server side shouldn't have direct access to your unencrypted file data or its decryption keys.

Still, any web-based service necessitates trusting the JavaScript you receive not to leak out your password or keys. Both Proton and Mega have a good track record so far in that regard, but the best practice for privacy with raw data storage is to encrypt your own data with local tools and treat any remote server as untrusted.

Proton includes cloud storage and recently started supporting automatic backup of pictures on your phone.

Proton has their own cloud storage called Proton Drive. If you buy the top VPN tier I think it includes all of the premium Proton services, Drive included. I think it's like 500 gigs for a single user account and 2 terabytes if you get the family account.

Mega was my option for family photo storage. Mainly used for instant upload to a shared folder between all of us.

As an added step, with some automations, my NAS server (TrueNAS) would sync my mega photo album to my local Nas storage. Files older than two years would be purged from mega and archives on my home NAS would stay intact.

Since then though I swapped mega out with my own personal self hosted nextcloud instance.

I think even the most hardcore self hosting guys would probably caution most against setting up their own mail server too. One of the few things that has too many caveats to make self hosting make sense.

Keeping a simple nas alive, with automated backups from linux + windows based machines with proper authentication already sometimes feels like a second job. Hosting all of your own services is way more effort than people realise

still too expensive though.

That. Or they could just read the article. Wild idea, I know lol