alt Hacker NewsI understand what e2ee is, thank you. I just don't think it’s justified for self-hosted photo servers.
E. g., “Any operations / transformations” includes facial recognition, CLIP embeddings, &c; you want to run this on the server, overnight, and to be able to re-run at a later date when new models become available. Under e2ee, that’s a round-trip through a client device at every model update. So that’s a significant downside, for no important upsides in the case when you and your family are the only users.
I was explaining why e2ee has important upsides, not how e2ee works. With Ente (and I think Immich as well), facial recognition and generating new CLIP embeddings are done on-device[0], usually right when the photo is taken / before they're uploaded to the server.
[0] https://ente.io/blog/image-search-with-clip-ggml/