True, e2ee is pretty scary as far as data loss.

Still, good application design can help mitigate that. Apple does it with their e2ee recovery methods, although Ente does rely on a recovery key that you should print out and put in a safe as well as store in other safe locations.

But also, what I love about the E2EE of Ente is that I can securely use a cloud hosted provider but then my home NAS backups are unencrypted.

The Ente desktop app has a continuous export feature where I just leave the application on my main desktop computer and it constantly backs it up to my home NAS. It also does the local machine learning and video streaming encoding processing on the desktop.

So, if I lose my Ente account, no big deal. I get another one and wipe everything and restore from my NAS backup.

I feel like this is the best of all worlds. I get cloud convenience and no real self-hosting burden along with solid ownership of my data.

Perhaps Immich doesn’t bother with e2ee since it’s primarily designed for self-hosting, while for Ente it’s meant to be suitable for both a paid cloud service and self-hosting.

Yeah Immich and Ente are going for two different use cases. While Ente can be self hosted, I view it as more of an escape hatch if they ever enshittify vs how I would start off using the service. I like not having to manage ingress for a photos service so my family can use it but others cannot