I went with Ente for this reason. I have 5 family members on my plan. They'd have likely joined my immich.

1) I don't want their photos on my server in a form I could view. My brothers a stand up guy, but you never know what people are into. 2) I've spent the last 2 years convincing people the cloud is someone elses computer and google can access your photos if it's not E2EE. To then get them using my server.

There was another reason which they solved in the latest release (my wife and I share an album of our daughter automatically via facial recognition).

I guess while I'm at it, the final reason I went with Ente even though it's paid was due to not wanting to be the failure point of my families photos, doing backups etc.

If you have your server encrypted at rest, don't you have to manually enter a password or use a hardware key each restart? And then it's not encrypted when running.

> If you self host, why does it matter if it is E2E? What's your threat model?

I prefer E2EE services because clients like GrapheneOS, iPhones, and Macs are a lot harder to hack than a server. And I use Cloudflare tunnels for convenience.

It's also just got really good apps and UX. On par with iCloud photos for the most part, which uses the same model when you have advanced data protection turned on.

Family members, once understanding, would be put at ease by the E2EE. And many people don't self host, so when using it from Ente it's essential. And they just release the stack they themselves run.